However, Catherine, this modern, enlightened despot, became less enlightened and more despotic during the Pugachev revolt (1774–1775).
This popular uprising in the southwestern part of her empire, led by a Cossack leader
who claimed to be acting on behalf of the assassinated tsar Peter III, Catherine’s
former husband, changed her ideas. During this peasants’ revolt over a thousand noblemen
and their families were killed, which was approximately 5 percent of the Russian nobility.[9] Instead of abolishing serfdom and giving the Russian people a parliament as she
had promised to do, she signed in 1785 the Charter of Nobility, which gave the Russian
nobility the same special rights as in Western Europe. Ironically, this happened at
a time when in Western Europe these rights began to be questioned and would be abolished
some years later during the French Revolution.[10] In the end Catherine’s “democratic revolution” created precisely the opposite:
it “created an aristocracy, the better to govern, or rather to dominate the mass of
the people. For some to have a sphere of rights due to special birth or rank was doubtless
better than for no one to have any assured rights at all.”[11] Catherine remained a convinced autocrat and is mainly remembered for her exuberant
love life and the Russian expansion into the Crimea.
How Lost Wars Led to Short-Lived Reforms
The despotic character of Russian rule was criticized not only by foreigners, but
equally by the Russian intelligentsia. However, reform periods in Russia were, in
general, short-lived. They were mostly introduced after lost wars, when the absolute power of the tsar and the ruling elite was temporarily weakened.
In the last two centuries there were at least four such lost wars that led to deep and important reforms: the Crimean War (1853–1856),
the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the First World War, and the Cold War.[12] The Crimean War had the effect of a wake-up call. Despite the fact that tsarist
Russia mobilized 1,742,297 officers and men, plus 787,197 irregulars and militia,
it was unable to deal with a force of 300,000 French, British, Sardinian, and Ottoman
troops.[13] The rank and file of the Russian army consisted of serfs, who were conscripts for
life. The officers came from the nobility. It became clear that in an epoch of mounting
nationalism one could not win a war with an army of unmotivated and illiterate serfs.[14] A direct consequence of the lost war was the Era of the Great Reforms, initiated
by tsar Alexander II, who during his reign (1855–1881) abolished serfdom in Russia.
However, these social reforms were less inspired by a genuine concern for the situation
of the exploited Russian muzhik, as by the geopolitical needs of the Russian empire. Walter Pintner rightly remarked
that it was “Russia’s military requirements [which] dictated major social changes.”[15] A similar situation arose in 1905 after the defeat in the war against Japan. This
defeat led to a revolution and subsequently to the formation of the first parliament,
the State Duma in Saint Petersburg. Another lost war: the defeat of the tsarist army
in the First World War gave birth to the February Revolution of 1917 that laid the
foundation for a Western-style democracy. Unfortunately, at the end of the same year
the fragile democratic government of Kerensky was swept away by the Bolsheviks, who
installed an autocratic and totalitarian system that endured for the next seventy
years. Although during the communist era Khrushchev’s rule brought a short period
of cultural “thaw” after Stalin’s death, it did not bring internal democratization,
and one had to wait until 1989 before the autocratic communist system began to crumble.
The High Expectations of 1989
