Feofan Prokopovich’s Pravda voli monarshei as Fundamental Law of the Russian Empire

In Russia, the government is a despotism mitigated by strangulation.

This sarcastic definition of “Russian constitution,” attributed to Germaine de Staël, reflects both contemporary and modern perceptions of 18th-century Russia.¹ An “age of palace revolutions” followed Peter’s reign, and between 1725 and 1801 most Russian rulers gained or lost power as the result of palace coups. Three tsars were killed by their successors’ supporters: Ivan VI, Peter III, and Paul I. This record of political instability considerably damaged the reputation of the post-Petrine Russian Empire, an age that well-educated Russians began to regard with marked disdain in the late 18th century.² Vasilii Kliuchevskii dedicated one of his famous harangues to Peter the Great’s unworthy successors:

Peter was succeeded by his widow, Catherine I, who was followed by the grandson of the reformer, Peter II, whose successor was Anna, duchess of Courland, the niece of Peter I and daughter of Tsar Ivan, who was succeeded by the infant Ivan Antonovich, son of her niece Anna Leopoldovna of Brunswick, daughter of Catherine Ivanovna, duchess of Mecklenburg, sister of Anna Ioannovna. The overthrown infant Ivan was succeeded by Peter I’s daughter, Elizabeth, who was succeeded by her nephew, Peter III, son of Anna Petrovna, duchess of Holstein, who was overthrown by Catherine II. It seems that never before, either here or anywhere else, had the line of succession been fractured so severely. The line was crushed along the way, which led these persons to supreme power. None of them owed their reign to any settlement based on law and custom whatsoever, but to hazard, palace revolution, and court intrigue.³

Why could the Romanovs not simply be a normal hereditary monarchy, like the Habsburgs, Hanoverians, Wittelsbachs, or Bourbons? Kliuchevskii, like most other historians, was convinced that Peter the Great’s Law of Succession, signed on 5 February 1722, had caused the mess.⁴ According to this law, the tsar gave himself the authority to disinherit his children and freely select his successor, without any regard to blood relationship.⁵ Historians have characterized this decision as an act of cultural violence by which Peter demolished customary primogeniture, causing all the trouble that later resulted in the many palace coups.⁶

The commonly accepted narrative begins with Tsar Peter the Reformer, who accomplished great things but failed to regulate his own succession, and ends with his great-grandson Paul, who was an incapable ruler but at least bequeathed to the fatherland three sons and a reasonable “house law” (his 1797 law reestablishing a clear-cut line of succession)—in all respects a flourishing dynastic family. It is believed that Peter’s decision was the product of particular circumstances regarding his personal relationship to his wayward son Aleksei.⁷ Driven by disappointment and fear that his heir apparent would one day destroy his life’s work, it is said, Peter made a decision that proved fatally wrong in the long term, for the lack of a clear line of succession hampered the evolution of a constitutional, legal order and of the kinds of institutions that could have facilitated Russia’s emancipation from autocracy. Because they were not legal heirs but rather usurpers, Russian tsars felt constrained to base their rule on violence instead of on law. The classical view, most recently defended by Igor’ Kurukin, stipulates that the absence of legal norms induced the Guards regiments to make the final decision and, if necessary, carry it out by armed force: might made right.⁸ As a consequence, for contemporary observers as for historians, 18th-century Russia temporarily seemed to move toward oriental despotism rather than European enlightened monarchy.⁹ For liberal constitutional historians such as Kliuchevskii the failure of dignitaries to select Peter’s successor by drawing on regulations of private inheritance law was a grave error, one that stripped the succession of a positive legal foundation.¹⁰

“Fundamental law” doctrine, as interpreted by Montesquieu, served as the basis for assessments of 18th-century Russian history by the likes of Kliuchevskii and...