Successive elective kings of Poland failed to overcome the inherent weaknesses of the state, and the belated reforms of Stanisław II served only to provoke the final dismemberments of 1793 and 1795. Russia was a prime beneficiary, having long shown that vast size was not incompatible with strong rule. Such an outcome would not have seemed probable in 1648, when revolt in Ukraine led to Russian “protection” and the beginning of that process of expansion which was to create an empire. The open character of Russia’s boundless lands militated against two processes characteristic of Western society—the growth of cherished rights in distinct, rooted communities and that of central authority, adept in the techniques of government. The validity of the state depended on its ability to make the peasant cultivate the soil. If the nobility were to serve the state, they must be served on the land. Serfdom was a logical development in a society that knew nothing of rights. The feudal concept of fealty, the validity of contract, and the idea of liberty as the creation of law were unknown. German immigrants found no provincial estates, municipal corporations, or craft guilds. Merchants were state functionaries. Absolutism was implicit in the physical conditions and early evolution of Russian society. It could only become a force for building a state comparable to those of the West under a ruler strong enough to challenge traditional ways. This was to be the role of Alexis I (1645–76) and then, more violently, of Peter I (1689–1725).

When the Romanov dynasty emerged in 1613 with Tsar Michael, the formula for continued power was similar to that of the Great Elector in Brandenburg: the common interest of ruler and gentry enabled Alexis to dispense with the zemsky sobor. The great code of 1649 affirmed the rights of the state over a society that was to be frozen in its existing shape. The tsars were haunted by the fear that the state would disintegrate. The acquisition of Ukraine led directly to the revolt of Stenka Razin (1670), which flared up because of the discontent of the serfs. The Russian people had been driven underground; their passivity could not be assumed. There was also a threatening religious dimension in the shape of the Old Believers. Rallying in reaction to the minor reforms of the patriarch Nikon, they came to express a general attachment to old Russia. This was as dangerous to the state when it inspired passive resistance to change as when it provoked revolt, such as that of the streltsy, the privileged household troops, whom Peter purged in 1698. Peter’s reforms of Russian government must be set against the military weakness revealed by the Swedish victory at Narva (1700), the grotesque disorder of government as exercised by more than 40 councils, the lack of an educated class of potential bureaucrats, and a primitive economy untouched by Western technology. His domestic policies can then be seen as expedients informed by a patchy vision of Western methods and manners. Catherine II studied his papers and said, “He did not know what laws were necessary for the state.” Yet, without Peter’s relentless drive to create a military power based on compulsory service, Catherine might have been in no position to carry out any reforms herself. His Table of Ranks (1722) graded society in three categories—court, government, and army. The first eight military grades, all commissioned officers, automatically became gentry. Obligatory service was modified by later rulers and abolished by Peter III (1762). By then the army had sufficient attraction: the officer caste was secure.

Meanwhile, the bureaucracy exemplified the style of a military police. The uniformed official, rule book in hand, was typical of St. Petersburg government until 1917. Peter’s new capital, an outrageous defiance of Muscovite tradition, symbolized the chasm that separated the Westernized elite from the illiterate masses. It housed the senate, set up in 1711, and the nine colleges that replaced the 40 councils. There also was the oberprokuror, responsible for the Most Holy Synod, which exercised authority over the church in place of the patriarch. Peter could control the institution; to touch the souls or change the manners of his people was another matter. A Russian was reluctant to lose his beard because God had a beard; a townsman could be executed for leaving his ward; a nobleman could not marry without producing a certificate to show that he could read. With a punitive tax, Peter might persuade Russians to shave and adopt Western breeches and jacket, but he could not trust the free spirit that he admired in England nor expect market, capital, or skills to grow by themselves. So a stream of edicts commanded and explained. State action could be effective—iron foundries, utilizing Russia’s greatest natural resource, timber, contributed to the country’s favourable trade balance—but nearly all Peter’s schools collapsed after his death, and his navy rotted at its moorings.

After Peter there were six rulers in 37 years. Two of the predecessors of Catherine II (1762–95) had been deposed—one of them, her husband Peter III, with her connivance. Along with the instability exemplified by the palace coup of 1741, when the guards regiments brought Elizabeth to the throne, went an aristocratic reaction against centralist government, particularly loathsome as exercised under Anna (1730–40). Elizabeth’s tendency to delegate power to favoured grandees encouraged aristocratic pretension, though it did lead to some enlightened measures. With the accession of the German-born Catherine, Russians encountered the Enlightenment as a set of ideas and a program of reforms. Since the latter were mostly shelved, questions arise about the sincerity of the royal author of the Nakaz, instructions for the members of the Legislative Commission (1767–68). If Catherine still hoped that enlightened reforms, even the abolition of serfdom, were possible after the Commission’s muddle, the revolt of Yemelyan Pugachov (1773–75) brought her back to the fundamental questions of security. His challenge to the autocracy was countered by military might, but not before 3,000,000 peasants had become involved and 3,000 officials and gentry had been murdered. The underlying problem remained. The tired soil of old Russia would not long be able to feed the growing population. Trapped between the low yield of agriculture and their rising debts, the gentry wanted to increase dues. The drive for new lands, culminating in the acquisition of Crimea (1783), increased the difficulties of control. Empirical and authoritarian, Catherine sought to strengthen government while giving the gentry a share and a voice. The Great Reform of 1775 divided the country into 50 guberni. The dvoriane were allowed some high posts, by election, on the boards set up to manage local schools and hospitals. They were allowed to meet in assembly. It was more than most French nobles could do: indeed, French demands for assemblies were a prelude to revolution. But as in the case of towns, by the Municipal Reform (1785), she gave only the appearance of self-government. Governors were left with almost unbounded powers. Like Frederick the Great, Catherine disappointed the philosophes, but the development of Russia took place within a framework of order. European events in the last years of Catherine’s life and Russian history, before and since, testify to the magnitude of her achievement.

Absolute monarchy had evolved out of conflicts within and challenges outside the state, notably that of war, whose recurring pressures had a self-reinforcing effect. The absolutist ideal was potent, and the rhetoric voiced genuine feeling. The sovereign who envisaged himself as God’s Lieutenant or First Servant of the State was responding to those who had found traditional constitutions wanting and whose classical education and religious upbringing had schooled them to look for strong rule within a hierarchical system. For more than 150 years, the upper classes of continental Europe were disposed to accept the ethos of absolutism. They would continue to do so only if the tensions within the system could be resolved and if the state were to prove able to accommodate the expectations of the rising bourgeoisie and the potentially unsettling ideas of the Enlightenment.