History of Russia (1721–1796)
Peter changed the rules of succession to the throne after the death of his son Aleksey, who had opposed his father's reforms and served as a rallying figure for anti-reform groups.
The Supreme Privy Council, a government body established by Catherine I that put Anna on the throne, attempted to impose various conditions on her.
Among notable cultural events were the founding of Moscow University (1755) and the Academy of Fine Arts (1757), along with the emergence of Russia's first eminent scientist and scholar, Mikhail Lomonosov.
Peter the Great had two wives, Yevdokiya Lopukhina (the daughter of a minor noble) and Marfa Skavronskaya (a Lithuanian peasant, renamed Catherine after her conversion to Orthodoxy).
[2] With the help of Aleksandr Menshikov (her advisor, ex-lover and leader of the palace guards), she gained the throne by emphasizing this connection to Peter I and her maternal nature.
[11] These included the inability of the empress to marry, designate a successor, declare war or peace, raise taxes, or spend state revenue without the consent of the Council.
[14] Together, they repealed Peter I's legislation which prohibited nobles dividing up their estates among their sons while similarly reducing the nobility's state service requirements.
In 1732, her government was forced to cede back all territories annexed several years earlier by Peter I in the North and South Caucasus to Persia, now led by Nader Shah, in order to forge a Russo-Persian alliance against the common enemy, the Ottoman Empire.
Peter I's last surviving daughter, Elizabeth, long on the sidelines, sensed this as her moment to obtain power and led a coup against Anna Leopoldovna and Ivan VI, imprisoning or banishing all who stood in her way.
[23] As the last surviving child of Peter I, Elizabeth's reign had a certain legitimacy and the people of the empire greeted her ascension as the end of German dominated rule.
[29] Despite the worsening life for the serfs, the majority of the population still saw Elizabeth as a benevolent ruler, when compared to the German brutes who dominated the court during Anna Ivanonva's and Ivan VI's reigns.
Catherine's journals describe him as incompetent bordering on mentally challenged, yet his acts as emperor illustrate a certain amount of shrewdness.
Catherine the Great's reign featured imperial expansion, which brought the empire huge new territories in the south and west, and internal consolidation.
The terms of the treaty fell far short of the goals of Catherine's reputed "Greek project" - the expulsion of the Ottomans from south-eastern Europe and the renewal of a Byzantine Empire under Russian control.
As Poland became increasingly weak in the eighteenth century, each of its neighbors (Russia, Prussia, and Austria) tried to place its own candidate on the Polish throne.
Roman Catholic Poles resented their loss of independence, however, and proved difficult to control, staging several uprisings against the occupation.
A decree of January 3, 1792, formally initiated the Pale of Settlement, which permitted Jews to live only in the western part of the empire, thereby setting the stage for anti-Jewish discrimination in later periods.
Historians have debated Catherine's sincerity as an enlightened monarch, but few have doubted that she believed in government activism aimed at developing the empire's resources, creating an educated elite, and reforming administration.
Other Cossacks, various Turkic tribes that felt the impingement of the Russian centralizing state, and industrial workers in the Ural Mountains, as well as peasants hoping to escape serfdom, all joined in the rebellion.
Russia's preoccupation with the war enabled Pugachev to take control of a part of the Volga area, but the regular army crushed the rebellion in 1774.
The Charter to the Nobility confirmed the liberation of the nobles from compulsory service and gave them personal rights that not even the autocracy could infringe.
The organization of society and the government system, from Peter the Great's central institutions to Catherine's provincial administration, remained basically unchanged until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and, in some respects, until the fall of the monarchy in 1917.
Catherine's push to the south, including the establishment of Odesa as a Russian port on the Black Sea, provided the basis for Russia's nineteenth-century grain trade.
During the early nineteenth century, Russia's population, resources, international diplomacy, and military forces made it one of the most powerful states in the world.
The population included Lutheran Finns, Baltic Germans, Estonians, and some Latvians; Roman Catholic Lithuanians, Poles, and some Latvians; Orthodox and Uniate Belarusians and Ukrainians; Muslim peoples along the empire's southern border and in the East; Orthodox Greeks and Georgians; and members of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Few qualities bind the classes together besides the climate, and different social castes experienced the Russian lifestyle in vastly dissimilar ways.
[40] The owner had few pursuits to distract him besides maintaining relationships with neighbors, religious and family obligations, and hunting, all of which made for a dull existence in the interim.
[42] The government told army colonels to give young nobles preference over non-nobles when promoting soldiers to higher ranks, regardless of the quality of the man in question, though several members of the highest class went further, contending that commoners should not even be allowed to become officers.
As a result of the country's poorly developed agricultural system, the peasant diet was high in meat, fish, milk, and butter products, with bread and grains less crucial, except in especially indigent areas.
His state was one of constant vulnerability; a bad season farming his land could bring famine and its related difficulties to his family, and he was always at the mercy of a master who could switch from benevolent to vicious at any moment.
