The Vibrant 18th Century

The 18th century is an unsettled and unsettling age. It was the culmination of the many transitions that marked the early modern period and the beginning of a recognizably different era, in which several of the key problems underlying modernity emerged in sharpest relief. Paul Bushkovitch and Nancy S. Kollmann have recently reminded us how firmly the 18th century was rooted in previous centuries marked by dynamism and rapid change, including the rapid transformation of mores in elite society and political culture, together with intensive economic and demographic shifts. For both of these historians, early modern Russia is best understood as “an empire teeming with group and individual actors, colliding and rushing forward.”¹ These collisions make the 18th century an exciting period to study, yet they are also precisely what render it so difficult to characterize. Marc Raeff may have exaggerated when he wrote, “the Russian nobleman of Elizabeth’s time, less than one generation after the death of Peter the Great, bore no resemblance to his grandfather, or even father.”² Within any single generation, however, the diversity of actors was enormous.

Some of these actors rushed forward, avidly embracing change; others preferred to stay put. The осмьнадцатый вѢкъ is no less remarkable for the social, political, and cultural institutions to which it gave rise than for the ones it left behind. To an earlier generation of historians, including Raeff (b. 1923), Iurii Lotman (b. 1922), Michael Confino (b. 1926), and Isabel de Madariaga (b. 1919), the 18th century was precisely one of becoming, and it was from this vantage point that they addressed such questions as the nature of autocracy, secularization, the transfer of Western ideas and customs, deepening social stratification, and the formation of the modern state, with its growing emphasis placed on legislation and legal norms. Younger scholars are drawn to the same questions, though with a greater eye to the institutions and beliefs that the 18th century did not outlive.

The four articles presented in this edition by Evgenii Akelev, Sergey Chernikov, Elena Marasinova, and Lorenz Erren address all these themes. Each is dedicated to a specific decree, making law and the mechanisms by which the state exacted obedience from its subjects a central theme. The first three, which use fine-grained archival research, are equally impressive for what they can tell us about 18th-century Russian society—not only the expansion of social stratification but also its limits. Marasinova modifies our picture of a deep stratification in the 18th century by showing that penalties for the murder of a serf were no less harsh than those for murdering a nobleman. Akelev shows us how information about Peter and his designs on his subjects’ beards traveled down the ranks and across Russia, allowing us to listen in on conversations between men of diverse origins. Chernikov draws on statistics to measure the manner in which Peter’s law on single inheritance of 1714 affected both members of the nobility and their serfs. Whether it be Peter’s degree on single inheritance (Chernikov) or his decree on beard shaving of 1705 (Akelev) or Elizabeth’s 1744 decree staying executions (Marasinova), the focus is less on the wording of the decree than on the social, economic, and cultural circumstances that gave rise to each and their lasting impact on the population. Erren’s contribution on the succession act of 1722, too, stresses continuities over change.

As our authors make clear, autocratic decision making appears less arbitrary when one situates a decree in its social, cultural, and political circumstances. Peter’s notorious law on shaving is a case in point. When we build in the context of the times, the famous barber of St. Petersburg is no longer the scissors-bearing deus ex machina familiar from older approaches but rather a chin stripper hard at work on a stage that has already been set; he understands the importance of timing and is alive to the possibility and consequences of resistance. Akelev’s argument certainly fits the paradigm of an “early modern empire that had to constantly renegotiate its ‘deals’ with subject peoples in order to be successful.”³ The same paradigm applies no...