Has Russia always played by its own rules?
Janet Hartley
“The common perception in western and central Europe was that Russia was not ‘one of us’”
“Russia is a European state.” Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, made this statement in 1767 in her Instruction – a document presented as a guide, at home and abroad, to the fundamentally ‘European’ forms of government shared by Russia with other ‘civilised’ states of central and western Europe. Catherine was a German princess, but her assumptions were shared by her predecessor, Peter the Great, who attempted to modernise Russian society and institutions along western European lines, as well as her grandson Alexander I, who saved ‘Europe’ from the tyranny of Napoleon, and all of the tsars up to 1917. Imperial Russia was part of Europe, and therefore followed European rules.
How did this Europeanness manifest itself? Russia shared European Christian traditions and participated in all forms of European culture. European ideas and philosophy – on forms of government, society, crime and punishment – were considered relevant to Russia. Russia followed the norms of European diplomacy and was an accepted member of the European states system. Russian armies fought in the same manner as European armies. Furthermore, the tsars consciously copied European institutions, laws and noble titles. They deliberately moulded noble and urban society so that their subjects behaved, and even looked, like west Europeans.
There were, however, two problems. First, implementation of European-style institutions was always limited by distinctive Russian features: the sheer size of the empire, which made implementation of change difficult; the existence of serfdom until 1861, which restricted social and economic development; the unwillingness of the tsars to limit their own powers until forced to do so in 1906 after the previous year’s revolution; the slow evolution of a legal consciousness and professional civil service. Second, a common perception in western and central Europe was that Russia
