The foundations of this power were the political alliance between the Romanov monarchy and the landowning aristocracy and gentry. In this respect Russia was similar to the other four European great powers (Britain, France, Austria and Prussia), all of which rested on a similar alliance between the crown and the landowning elites. In each case this alliance had its specific traits. In Britain, for instance, monarchical power was not absolute and the aristocracy was the senior partner in a coalition which included financial and commercial elites.4
Though all four continental great powers were in theory absolute monarchies, no one doubted that the power of the Russian emperor was more complete than that of his French, Austrian or even Prussian peers. He could make laws and tax his peoples without their consent, and no laws protected even his most aristocratic subjects against his arbitrary whims. By contrast, especially in France and Austria, aristocratic assemblies and judicial institutions inherited from medieval feudalism inhibited a monarch’s power, as indeed did the ethos of the social elites, including sometimes of the monarchs themselves and their relatives. Other factors also enhanced the power of the Russian autocrat. For example, in Protestant Europe the previously enormous landholdings of the Catholic Church had been confiscated during the Reformation and had mostly fallen into the hands of the aristocracy. In eighteenth-century Catholic Europe most of these lands were still held by the Church. In Russia, however, the monarchy had confiscated the vast wealth of the Orthodox Church by the 1760s and largely held on to it for itself. That was one key reason why by the 1790s more than 40 per cent of the entire serf population ‘belonged’ not to private landlords but to the crown.5
The immense and arbitrary power of the autocrat was an everyday reality in Russian politics and government. The autocrat’s policies and the skill with which he or she managed both the machinery of government and the aristocratic elite were of crucial importance. But a Russian monarch was simultaneously all-powerful and yet in some respects strongly constrained. Even European Russia was vastly larger than any other great power. Its population did not exceed that of France until the 1750s and remained widely scattered by European standards in Alexander I’s reign. Land-based communications were primitive and disintegrated into impassable mud in the spring and autumn. The state bureaucracy was small, corrupt and incompetent. In 1763 Russia had only slightly more state officials than Prussia, though the latter was a hundredth the size of Russia-in-Europe. A Prussian monarch could recruit bureaucrats trained in law and administration from the many German universities which in some cases had existed since medieval times. When Alexander I came to the Russian throne in 1801 Russia had just one university, founded in Moscow in 1755. After the reform of provincial government in 1775 the state administration in the countryside began to thicken but in the great majority of cases these new officials were drawn from, and often elected by, the local landowning gentry. Very often these men had served as army officers for a few years before returning to the provinces to marry and inherit small estates. The extension of local administration therefore deepened the mutual dependence of the monarchy and the landowning class.
On the one hand the Romanovs could not do without the landowners, whom one monarch called the state’s involuntary tax-collectors and recruitment agents in the villages. Nor could the state survive without the service of noblemen in its bureaucracy and, above all, as officers in its army. But the gentry also badly needed the state. Employment as officers or officials was a crucial additional source of income. The state also provided security for the landowners against peasant recalcitrance or insurrection. In 1773 a revolt of Cossacks and peasants spread across a huge area in the Urals and along the lower Volga, headed by Emelian Pugachev. It took many months of campaigning by thousands of regular troops to suppress the rebellion, which cost hundreds of nobles their lives and left a deep scar on the consciousness of the elites. For a small but nevertheless significant number of minor nobles the army and even bureaucracy provided a channel by which they could rise into the aristocratic elite and thereby acquire wealth. The constant wars of the eighteenth century provided many opportunities for young nobles to prove themselves.
