<>1680:1730; Southern New World colonies (future USA) | In this half century, black slaves became the backbone of agricultural economy (in connection with growing world market for tobacco and an expanding global slave trade over the previous century)
*--Of near equal importance in the earlier history of labor in the New World were indentured, or bonded, servants. These were European immigrants who, in return for passage to America, bound themselves to work there for a number of years, after which time they were to be freed. Some have said that the practice was closely related to the tradition of apprenticeship, in which a youth was assigned to work for a master in a certain trade and in return was taught the skills of the trade. But a better relationship is to slavery or serfdom. Indentured servitude was a form of bound labor in which the time duration of the condition was clearer and generally briefer. In much the same way, convicts were an important source of colonial labor; thousands of English "criminals" were sentenced to labor in the colonies for a specified period, after which time they might be freed
*--Gottlieb Mittelberger came to Pennsylvania from Germany in 1750. He later published a description of his experience as indentured servant [TXT]. Mittelberger fared better than most. His "serfdom" was as schoolmaster and organist in Philadelphia. He returned to Germany in 1754
*--"Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English colonists resorted to varying forms of peonage and indentured servitude before settling on slavery as the institution most suitable to developing the economic potential of newly acquired lands in the Americas" [Kolchin:2]
*--Slavery and other forms of bound labor in colonial possessions partially filled the needs of an increasingly serf-free western and central Europe
*--Eastern Europe was another matter. In Russia serfdom and the power of noble "serf owners" flourished in this half century (1680-1730). Serfdom waxed in Russia in just those decades when it was disappearing in the domestic life of the rest of Europe
*--The 17th century was the century in which there was a thriving global market for bound human labor, and not just in USA and Russia. North Africa in that century held nearly one million Europeans in slavery [2004no16:TLS:33]
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*--Kolchin, 1-17 provides the best brief combined account of the origins of slavery and serfdom
*--Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), chapter one "The International Context of U.S. Slavery":13-37
*--George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American & South African History (1981):3-28

<>1682ja12: Mestnichestvo [ancestral hierarchy among noble state servitors to the tsarist throne in Moscow] was abolished [VSB,1:238-40]. Muscovite mestnichestvo was related to, but not to be confused with, Kievan mestnichestvo before the Mongol invasion. This much older Kievan mestnichestvo system regulated relationships among several main fortress and trade cities and their "contract" princes. The Muscovite mestnichestvo system which was now abolished regulated relationships among noble state servitors to the Moscow throne
*--As Moscow power and procedures evolved, the word "mestnichestvo" had come to signify a hierarchy among noble votchinniki [patrimonial princes], especially the boyar elite in the deliberative assembly known as the "Boyar Duma" [ID]. Muscovite mestnichestvo measured and acknowledged prestige and precedence at the court of the Moscow grand prince
*--Abolition of Muscovite mestnichestvo strengthening the hand of the tsar as he sought to appoint noble government servitors as he wished, according to his needs and interests rather than in accordance with rank among aristocratic elites. The decline of votchinniki served the interests of pomeshchiki. It also foretold the demise of the  Boyar Duma
*--GO 1722ja24:Table of Ranks
\\
*--Kliuchevkii,4(4) reviews the Muscovite social/service class structure
*--Blum:137-8 describes the mestnichestvo system

<>1682:Moscow Slavonic-Greko-Latin Academy founded, representing spread of a Church renaissance, the Orthodox experience of the "great spiritual re-armament" that gripped all Europe and which, for Slavs, began at the Kiev Academy [VSB,1:248]

<>1682ap14:Old-Ritualist Archpriest Avvakum burned at stake on orders of Church
*--His autobiography became a classic of early Russian cultural history = The Archpriest Avvakum, the Life Written by Himself [Excerpts: FTS:134-181 | ZMR2:399-448 | RRC2,1:128-40 | VSB,1:259f | DMR2:322-31 | DMR3:479-88 | ZMR1:320-70| BL&T:90f]

<>1682ap27:Russian tsar Fedor died. Several weeks of disorder followed before Sofiia was proclaimed Regent, ruling in the place of the two young heirs, Peter and Ivan
\\
*--Bushkovitch:80-125 (on era of Fedor)

<>1682my15:my19; Strel'tsy [Musketeers] [ID] rebelled [VSB,1:240-1]
*--The great Boyar diplomat Artamon Matveev was killed in this rebellion
\\
*--Bushkovitch:49-80 (on Matveev and the rebellion)

<>1682je:1689se; Sofiia reigned as Regent for youthful co-tsars Ivan V (her brother) & Peter I (her half-brother) for seven years
*--Vasilii Golitsyn a powerful influence on Sofiia (some want to call him a "Westernizer") and an ambitious but unsuccessful military leader against the Ottoman Turks in the Pontic steppes
*1723:Prince B. I. Kurakin remembered young Peter [VSB,2:311-13]
\\
*--Florinsky,1(12)
*--Kliuchevskii,4(1)
*--Bushkovitch:127-70 (on era of Sofiia); 170-213 (on co-tsar Peter's first years)
*--Hughes:1-21 (Sofiia)
*--Lindsey Hughes, Russia and the west : the life of a seventeenth-century westernizer, Prince Vasily Vasilevich Golitsyn (1643-1714)
*--Aleksei N. Tolstoy, Peter the Great [a novel about Peter's early life]

<>1683:Vienna, capital city of the diminished Austrian Empire, survived Ottoman Turkish siege with difficulty

<>1685:Siberian Amur River valley | Albazin ostrog [frontier fortress] created
*--Tensions between the Chinese Empire and Russia mounted in SE Siberia

<>1686:Poland and Russia (with Vasilii Golitsyn playing key role) settled long conflict. Kiev & Smolensk now formally within the boundaries of Russian tsarist authority
*--Russia sought quiet along two of its three main imperialist frontiers (westward [a European empire] and eastward [a north Asian and new-world empire]) in order to concentrate on the third (southward [a Central Asian empire])
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Main Periods of [Polish] History [in Polish]

<>1687:England | Isaac Newton published Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. Newtonian discoveries & theories (e.g., gravity, calculus) were fundamental contributions to the "scientific revolution" and the broader and startling shifts in world view subsumed under the term "the Enlightenment" (the age of rationalism and empiricism)
*--A few years later, on a wild tour through western European capitals [ID], Russian tsar Peter I arrived in London and went straight to a meeting, not with English royalty or other grandees of the British realm, but with Isaac Newton
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*--Wagar on rationalism in the Enlightenment [TXT]

<>1687:Andrei Bezobrazov's wife wrote him letters, revealing aspects of everyday life and the experiences of an educated Russian woman [KRR:213-6]

<>1689ja:1689fe; English Convention Parliament declared "That king James II, having endeavored to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the government, and that the throne is vacant"
*--The Declaration of Rights established the "true, ancient, and indubitable rights of the people of this realm", especially that any law issued or suspended without the consent of Parliament was henceforth illegal [TXT]
*--Together, these two main events constitute what the English like to call "The Glorious Revolution"

<>1689au27:Siberia | Nerchinsk Treaty signed by Russia & China. Chinese power extended into Outer Mongolia. Russia conceded to China the left and right bank watersheds of the Amur River basin [g] and the Ili River system in Central Asia (modern-day Kazakhstan) [g]
*--Event described by Jesuit translator in Chinese service, Thomas Pereira [Lensen,Eastward:47-9 quotes from Sebes, Jesuits] Fedor Alekseevich Golovin was the Russian ambassador [DMR2:331-3]
*--Nerchinsk Treaty honored until 1843
*--Until now, Siberian expansion met no serious resistance. Now Russia came against a powerful third party, China. The indigenous, contiguous or continental phase of Russian expansion temporarily came to an end in far SE Siberia
*--"Bouncing" off China, Russia now looked harder at NE Siberia and across the North Pacific, but very tentatively, with no urgent plans. Urgency seemed to come from the south. Russia would not for a century become involved in anything like the other contemporary European overseas corporations, but its southern ambitions were a natural extension of long term trends of frontier and imperialist expansion
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*--Bushkovitch:213-55 (on Golovin and other early favorites of youthful Peter I)
*--Mark Mancall, Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (1971)

<>1689se:1695; Regency of Sofiia replaced by regency of Peter I’s mother

<>1690mr17:Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Joachim issued testament [VSB,2:361-3]

<>1692:New World colonies (future USA) MA Salem witch trials targeted certain women accused of being in league with Satan; result: a score of "witches" executed

<>1694:1696; tsar Peter I and Ivan V co-tsars for two years under regency of Peter’s mother
*1694:Peter began Russian navy [W] He was looking south toward the dominions of the Ottoman Turks and their allies, the Crimea Tatars
*1695:1696; Azov, port at the mouth of Don River [g], captured in two campaigns against Ottoman Turks, but navy weak and success very unstable
*--Folksong celebrated the event [WAL:176-7]
\\
*--B. H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire
*--Hughes:22-6

<>1696:1725; tsar Peter I assumed sole authority upon death of Ivan V and reigned for 29 years
*--Beginnings of Petrine transformation of old Russia [NB! avoid the term "Westernization" prior to the 19th century]
*--Peter and his vigorous plans for Russian modernization did not appear out of nowhere =
    (1) the reign of tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (1645-1676)
    (2) the 14 years immediately preceding 1696
*--Patrick Gordon, Passages from the Diary…in the Years 1635-1699 (1968)
*--Early 20th-century Russian historian Pavel Miliukov [ID] assessed the legacy of Peter I [TXT]
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*--Mironov,2:366-380  compares Russia with Europe, 1700-1917, to illustrate a shared transition from "tradition" to "modernity"
*--Lindsey Hughes, Peter the Great: A Biography (2002). A series of highly readable brief essays on the leading issues and moments
*--See also his Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998)
*--Raeff:69-76 compares Peter I's and Catherine II's institutional reforms
*--Kliuchevskii,4(2) describes Peter's character
*--Some notes on the Vladimir Petrov movie about "Peter I"

<>1697:Siberia | Russian frontier/imperialist expansion to Kamchatka Peninsula [g] [DC&V,2 (documents cover 1700:1797)]
*--Vladimir Vasilievich Atlasov [Volodimer Otlasov], a Cossack or Ukrainian of Ustiug peasant origins, set out for Siberia where he became one of Russia's toughest and most resolute explorers. In Yakutsk [Sakha] [g] he registered to serve with the Cossacks until he was 50 years old
*1695 he was named prikashchik [overseer, technical administrator, officer of a Prikaz] of Anadyr ostrog [frontier fortress] with credentials of broad and loose implication. On the basis of information from a Cossack named Luk Morozko, Atlasov led a hundred or so indigenous yasak natives against Koriak ostrozhki [little ostrogs] and set the Russian Orthodox cross on Kanuch R. banks [BrE,3:432] "Because this venture was richly rewarding, beyond anyone’s expectations, the government sanctioned it immediately. Thus there was created a solid link between private and national interests. While at time these interests were at odds, for the most part they cooperated very closely, not only in the Russian drive across northern Asia, but also in the North Pacific and in North America" [Dmytryshyn"Russian Expansion:7]
*1700:Siberia, Yakutsk | Atlasov reported to Moscow on Kuril Islands [g] and their proximity to Japan [SIE,1:926] Atlasov had come across Japanese sailor-adventurer Dembei whose vessel was cast ashore [KEJ,6:340| SHJ,3:201-2| Beasley,MHJ:39-40] This is 1st of at least sixteen ships cast upon Russian shores [by accident or design] over the next century & half, and a source of quickening contact and understanding between Russia and Japan
*1711:Kamchatka | Atlasov was killed by workers fed up with his cruelties. Atlasov might stand for the hundreds of nameless Cossack peasant adventurers, active for a century, since the time of Yermak, a "motley band of restless riffraff", Muscovite and non-Muscovite, who crossed the Urals, defeated the forces of Siberian khan Kuchum, Imposed payment of yasak [tribute; sometimes "iasak"] on the indigenous peoples they encountered, and laid Muscovy's claim to their territories in Siberia
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*--SIE,1:926
*--Kisaki Tyohei, Eiju-maru Rosia Hyoryu Ki (TOK:1982):20-25, cited in Togawa,"Russian and Slavic":4. BBL/Plummer]

<>1697mr:1698su; Russia sent a large delegation, "the Grand Embassy", to visit west European capitals [g], led by Lefort and including tsar Peter as lowly ensign. They toured the German, Dutch and English speaking capitals of northern Europe in pursuit of allies against the Ottoman Turks, but also to observe, learn, and recruit. [CF: second great tour of Europe]
*--Peter began construction of a navy intended in future for securing the Black Sea and Crimea [g]. He ordered thousands of workers to begin construction of a canal linking the Volga and Don rivers
*--Peter's own 1717 version of this sojourn [VSB,2:313]
*--Sophia of Hanover described Peter's visit [VSB,2:313-]
*--In Vienna, about to head south to Venice, tsar Peter got word of yet another Strel’tsy revolt and dashed home to Moscow
*--To the east, expansion slackened while more peaceful trade-related relationships flourished. Russian attention shifted to the southern and western frontiers. These two directions of Russian imperialist expansion (south and west) still closely linked. Russian ambitions or defense needs to the south required peace and cooperation along western borders

<>1698su: Strel'tsy [Musketeers] rebelled [DIR2:1-12 | DIR3:1-13] causing Peter to respond in a decisive and cruel fashion, a heavy blow against the old guard of the Muscovite military
*--Peter's most trusted associate Fedor Yur'evich Romodanovskii became the main policeman and executioner, moving into a more or less permanent role as "assistant tsar" and head of security
*1698se05:1699fe04; Austrian imperial envoy to Moscow Johann George Korb described Strel'tsy suppression and other court events [VSB,2:314-16]

<>1699:tsar Peter I gave Nev'ianskii zavod [factory] in Urals to Nikita Demidov. Demidov was a famous Tula area blacksmith, a commoner whose talents appealed to Peter. Demidov took Peter's grants of mines and metallurgical factories in Siberia, developed them, became rich, and was ennobled by Peter

<>1699:1700; First intense period of Peter's radical "dress code" and grooming laws. He personally and publicly sheared old-fashioned beards. Romodanovskii was subjected to this humiliation. Peter ordered everyone to remove the old long-sleeved Russian costumes and to dress in the Hungarian or German fashion. He himself wore "French" clothes
*--In these years Russian subjects were fascinated with this outrageous side of tsar Peter. Street-sheets portrayed the shaving of beards. These were called Lubki [lubok in singular, meaning a broadside, chapbook, print, or advertisement based on popular imagery] [pix]
*--Peter's dress-code and grooming laws threatened traditional identity as it forced leading figures to change their whole appearance. Note that Peter lacked any interest in how merchants, peasants, or other lesser urbanites dressed or groomed themselves. These laws aimed at state-servitor elites. So, another effect followed = The extreme gap between elites and the great majority of those who lived in the Empire was exacerbated, and the great majority interpreted Peter's secular modernization as sacrilege
*--The wide-spread rumor that the real tsar Peter had been murdered while in Europe on the Grand Embassy, and that the anti-Christ or Devil had replaced him, seemed confirmed in these superficial but shocking policies. Peter was toying with appearances, yes, but this was a highly ritualistic environment, made more explosive by the corrosive effects of the Raskol [Schism] and the fears of bearded and traditionally dressed Old-Ritualists. The groundwork was laid for the broadly held Russian cultural presumption that St. Petersburg, which was founded in the next few years, was not a Russian city
*--Peter's reforms had a definite "everyday" quality to it, but its effects were profound even when they involved the apparent superficialities of dress and grooming
*--Documents relating to attitudes and measures connected with Petrine transformation [VSB,2:363-8]
\\
*--Hughes:248-98 (monarchical every day life), 357-90 (Peter's personality)
*--Florinsky,1(14) deals with Peter's administrative reforms
*--Claes Peterson, Peter the Great's Administrative and Judicial Reforms: Swedish Antecedents and the Process of Reception
*--Marc Raeff, ed., Peter the Great: Reformer or Revolutionary?
*--B. H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia [DK131.59]
*--Kazimierz Waliszewski, Peter the Great

<>1700:Moscow | At the death of Adrian, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, tsar Peter refused to allow appointment of replacement
*--In this year tsar Peter did reform the Russian calendar, replacing the old Orthodox calendar with the Julian Calendar [DIR3:14]. Now secular Russia was at least in the same century and almost always in the same year as the other European nations. While the Julian Calendar was more in line with European norms, Europe was at this time moving away from the Julian Calendar in favor of the Gregorian. Every century the Julian Calendar fell one day behind the Gregorian, and as of 1700 it was eleven days behind [more on Russian calendar]

<>1700:1721; Sweden and Russia fought the "Great Northern war" for 21 years. Two young monarchs, Charles XII & Peter I, and their whole nations wasted themselves in a struggle that was to compromise the ambitions of each nation. More broadly the struggle embittered Russian-west European relations for decades and hindered modernizing reforms in both regions. Sweden suffered the most severe damage
*--Poland was caught between and declined [g]
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*--Kliuchevskii,4(3) summarized the diplomatic and military situation as a result of "Western" aggression = "Peter found himself in an awkward situation. His work at Voronezh had been completely destroyed; the fleet which had cost so much in money and effort, and which had been intended for the Black Sea, was left to rot in the ports of Azov. He had been unable to acquire Kerch, and was not firmly established in the Crimea [and wouldn't be for nearly one century]. The canal which was to have linked the Volga with the Don, and which had been started by thousands of workmen, was abandoned [not to be completed until 1952, nearly 160 years later!]; the newly awakened aspirations of the Balkan Christians were ignored [and this situation festered for more than a century and played its role in causing WW1]; the security of southern Russia, which was menaced by the Turks, was neglected. Peter had suddenly to change fronts and move from the south to the Baltic, where a coalition against Sweden had been formed. The latest combination of events in Europe threw him, like a skittle in a game of bowls [a pin struck by a bowling ball], from the mouth of the Don to Narva and the Neva, where absolutely nothing had been organized" [61, see 151 for detail on the Volga-Don Canal project and 152 for information on the Neva-Volga project]. Kliuchevskii helps us see just how the Great Northern War undermined Russian hopes in the south and distracted Russian imperialist expansion from its opportunities to the east
*--Hughes:26-57
*--Christopher Duffy, Russia's Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russia's Military power, 1700-1800
*--English-language website of the Russian Navy explains the role of sea power in the Great Northern War and the naval legacy of Peter I [W]

<>1702:Moscow | Japanese castaway Dembei met tsar Peter, who greeted and hired him to teach Japanese. Peter ordered collection of information on Japan for purposes of expanded trade. Next quarter-century, Cossack, hunters and government agents searched Kuril Islands looking for Japan [KEJ,6:340] Increased frequency of Russian-Japanese ventures [SHJ,3:202]
*--No doubt the full story of Russian/Japanese interaction was not recorded in surviving documents because the stingy Russian mercantilist approach to Siberian expansion made unofficial acts of exploration and trade illegal. In the same way, Japanese "National Seclusion" policy, their own form of mercantilist control over international commerce, restricted independent Japanese adventurers. These two national policies punished individual efforts to profit from an opening frontier in far eastern Siberia. Russian and Japanese entrepreneurs had to be cagey and secretive [Bychkov lecture]

<>1702de16:Saint Petersburg Vedomosti [News] became first Russian newspaper [BL&T:50f]. Russia took its place among other European peoples entering the era of print-media =
*1556:+; Italy, Venetian city officials posted Notizie scritte which were later printed and sold for a small coin called gazzetta. An early forerunning of the newspaper
*1622:1641; English writer Nathaniel Butter published Weekly Newes, but it was suppressed in times of trouble [ID]
*1702:+; England | First daily newspaper, Daily Courant
*1709:1712; England | Joseph Addison and Richard Steele published popular and controversial newspapers Tatler and Spectator. From the very beginning journalism was associated either with official propaganda or, more characteristically, with the rise of independent public opinion. The printing press was the natal technology behind the creation of modern civil society. Addison and Steele gathered associates and engaged in various forms of publicly relevant sociability, not in churches or chanceries, but in taverns and clubs. They were active in a volunteer association that called itself the Kit-Cat Club (Kit-Kat Club) [ID] Addison was the son of an Anglican clergyman, but he now set off on a very modern and secular career
 

SPB birj.jpg (19462 bytes)

<>1703:Saint Petersburg declared the new city to be the new capital of a new Empire [W#1] [W#2] [W#3] [W#4] [W#5] VIDEOTAPE
*--Tsar Peter I shifted from the old heartland capital Moscow to the shores of the Gulf of Finland and fast by the Baltic Sea [g]. Peter opened his "window to the West", and the Petrine transformation was in full swing [DIR2:12-21]
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Hughes:203-48

<>1705:+; Bashkir steppes again animated by a movement to promote Muslim grandeur. A Bashkir leader declared self Holy Sultan. Visited Istanbul and got support of Caucasus peoples (EG: Chechens)
*--Cossacks & Old-Ritualists joined with these Bashkir insurgents. Fortress outposts Ufa, Samara, etc. under siege. Islamic forces approached Kazan. Russia was occupied with the Great Northern War
*--Buddhist Kalmyks played an ambiguous role in this era
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*--Michael Khodarkovsky, Where two worlds met: the Russian state and the Kalmyk nomads, 1600-1771

<>1707mr25:Russian decree against peasant serfs fleeing their villages and obligations [DIR2:125 | DIR3:139]
*--On military recruitment in villages [VSB,2:327-8]
*--Peter endorsed the most severe serfdom in all of Europe, that found on the estates where Germanic Baltic baronial power lorded over indigenous Estonian and Latvian villagers. Peter sought to lure these colonial feudal lords away from Sweden or Poland [VSB,2:334]
*--There is some reason to believe that Peter did not intend to build his new empire on the basis of serf labor. As the Great Northern War wound down, he sought to limit noble abuse of peasants [VSB,2:354] However, Petrine transformation required mobilization of limited resources, and that forced harsh measures. Conditions worsened for serfs

<>1709je27:Russia, on the southern frontier (Ukraine), 200 miles SE from Kiev (!!) [g], near the city Poltava | Russia delivered decisive military defeat to invading Swedish armies. Charles XII fled to Turkey
*--Russian-Ukrainian relations with Ukrainian cossacks strained. Old ally of Russia, Cossack Ivan Mazepa, Hetman from 1687-1708, defected to Turkey. So, Russian-Turkish relationship heated up [VSB,2:330-6]
*--Wasteful war of imperialist expansion was not settled for another 12 years
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*--Ukrainian encyclopedia entry on Mazepa [W]

<>1710:English envoy Charles Whitworth described Peter [VSB,2:316]. Other first-hand accounts [321-6]

<>1711:London | "South Sea Co." was chartered. This corporation was capitalized with massive shareholding initiative and governmental subsidies. Managers of the company took the capital and invested in whaling ships. Over the next half century, they failed as whalers, but they did help extend British imperial authority over the globe. Huge mercantilist overseas corporate organizational design did not seem to suit the needs of the whaling industry, here at the dawn of the age of energy politics. However, the corporation was to play some role in the international struggle for dominance in the whale-oil era

 <>1711fe22:Russian tsar Peter I, setting off to the south on a campaign against Swedish King Charles XII and his new Turkish ally, issued a short ukaz. "WE appoint the governing Senate to administer in OUR absence" [VSB,2:336-7 | Russian TXT PiB 11,1:100 | DIR3:15]
*--This government reform ended the 250-year institutional life of the old Boyar Duma. The ukaz seemed almost ironic when it ordered the following: "Discover all unnecessary government activities, and put a stop to them"
*--Petrine transformation had distinct institutional face
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*--Bushkovitch:293-339
*--Hughes:92-134
*--Kliuchevskii,4:200-06 discusses whether Senate was "decentralization" of political authority

<>1713:1714; Kuril Islands (stretching out to sea from the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula toward the NE corner of the Japanese island Hokkaido [g]) explored by Russian adventurers. They made land fall on Sakhalin Island [Sansom,WWJ:212]

<>1713:Russian political-economist Fedor Saltykov wrote Propozitsii [Proposition]. Then in 1714: Iz"iavleniia pribytochnye gosudarstvu [Profitable Testimony to the State]. Saltykov was alert to the benefits England had reaped from its mercantilist and imperialist policies. He urged Russia to develop its southern and eastern markets and take advantage of its Eurasian location
*--Russia had earlier been the target of one of the earliest examples of organized mercantilist aggression, now Saltykov recommended that Russia itself take charge of that eastward mercantilist mission
*--Very little could be done to realize Saltykov's recommendations. Russia was still "once-burned-twice-shy" about China. And an expedition to discover Japan at first yielded no results. An important treaty with China followed soon
*--Petrine "domestic" economic development of manufactures bore some resemblance to mercantilist corporatism, but it was not until after the Russian trans-Pacific discovery of Alaska that The Russian-America Co. was created, a Russian version of the overseas mercantilist corporation for exploitation of imperial dominions.

<>1714:Saint Petersburg | Peter I decrees on building of new capital [BL&T:16]

<>1714fe14:By decree, Peter I made education compulsory for the Russian nobility [DIR3:15]
*1714mr23::Decree on primogeniture [DIR3:16]. Owners of heritable property in land had to pass it on to a single heir designated by the owner. In other words, Peter sought to bring an end to ruinous inheritance practices among landed gentry which divided estates among all heirs, slowly whittling them down below a size that could support the nobility. Inheritance by the oldest son (rarely, oldest daughter) is called "primogeniture", a practice common among European landed elites, but extremely rare in the Russian tradition [EG], at least until tsar Peter I
*--He sought also to encourage "second sons" ( or daughters, for that matter) to seek their fortune elsewhere than on the rural estate, perhaps in the technical fields and other useful pursuits so much needed in a modernizing Russian empire (e.g., navigation [DIR3:18])
*1715fa:1716wi; Peter corresponded with his own reluctant son Aleksei, calling on him to show more resolve to learn the martial and other arts and skills necessary for the modern monarch. Son Aleksei continued to drag his feet, and this at just the time Peter was gearing up for his second European tour and preparing a new round of extensive change [DIR3:24-28]
*--Petrine transformation reached into the Russian social structure, but no clear Petrine economic policy yet emerged, aside from those designed to meet the pressing contingencies of war

<>1716fe:1717oc; tsar Peter I made his second European tour (CF: first great trip abroad)
*--Tour lasted one year and nine months! The first months were in German-speaking central Europe, the winter of 1716-1717 in The Netherlands and surrounding lowlands, and the spring in France

<>1716:London | John Perry published The State of Russia under the Present Czar [sic] covering events and personalities between 1689-1712, including information on the Volga-Don Canal project [VSB,2:316-20 | RRC2]

<>1717:Russian Vice-Chancellor (high diplomatic post) Petr Shafirov, who was a close confidant of Peter I, published Discourse Concerning the First Causes of the War between Sweden and Russia

<>1717de11:tsar Peter I, fresh from his second European tour, decreed new imperial administrative reforms, restructuring government under nine colleges (colleges in this case meant something like "ministries", suggesting systematic definition of governmental functions and distribution of responsibilities out to various appropriate departments) [VSB,2:337-8] The colleges were =
    Foreign Affairs
    State Revenues
    Justice
    State Accounting
    Military
    Admiralty
    Commerce
    State Expenses
    Mines and Manufacture
*--Detailed webpage

<>1718je::tsar Peter I authorized (and probably took part in) torture and death of his son Aleksei [DIR2:25-30 | DIR3:28-33]. More of the correspondence of Peter and Aleksei, etc. [VSB,2:338-41]
*--A Russian folk legend had it that son Aleksei died when he failed to respond properly to Peter's efforts to make him an accomplished ship carpenter. Peter wanted him to continue the building of wooden ships for Russia. But this was not his talent. He just couldn't get the beams square. In a rage, Peter broke his skull with a hammer. Of course, the legend is not "accurate", but at some level of cultural significance, it was right on the mark.
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*--Nikolai Ge's painting of Peter I interrogating his son Aleksei
*--Bushkovitch:339-426
*--Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s novel Peter and Alexis

<>1718:Neva River-Volga River canal project which stretched along the banks of Lake Ladoga [g] (begun in 1702), moved into final phase. Menshikov was put in charge with the usual meager results. After 1721, the project was handed over to Burkhard von Münnich who completed the task, but not until after Peter's death

<>1719de10:Peter I issued decree on College of Mining. Others followed in which state chartered private enterprise in heavy industrial sector. Economic as well as institutional modernization were all a part of the Petrine plan, but every action was under the pressure of war-time crisis [VSB,2:354-5 and 357-8]
*--As the Great Northern War wound down, the Petrine transformation was able to extend its reach into neglected areas of "civilian" or non-military need
\\
*--Hughes:135-59
*--Florinsky,1(13) deals with the war and the economy under Peter
*--Raeff:89-92 summarizes Peter I's economic policies

<>1720:1722; Siberia, SE slopes of the Ural Mountains, at edge of Bashkir steppes | Governmental official, Vasilii Tatishchev, founded & directed factories and mines. Set up Uktusskii zavod [factory], moved it to site of future Ekaterinburg, a frontier fortress city [g]. Delegated merchants to the tasks of establishing a market and building roads. Established two mining schools and legal courts. He introduced regulations on forestry
*1721ja18:Decree authorized factories to buy villages of serfs [DIR3:18]
*1720:Bashkir people signed treaty with Russia. Bashkirs still independent, but must repatriate (send back) all Russians who flee into Bashkir lands & accept no more refugees. Over the next 2 years, 4965 families (ca.20,000 persons) were sent back to Russia [Russian BrE]
*--Tatishchev clashed with the entrepreneur Nikita Demidov on the question of what role the state should play in the frontier economy. Demidov depended on Peter's royal favor to get his start, but wished thereafter to operate without restraint. Tatishchev wished to impose state regulations on free-wheeling exploitation of the regions natural resources and labor. Genik was sent from Saint Petersburg to settle the dispute and found in Tatishchev’s favor
*--By the middle of the 18th century, the Demidov factories produced 40% of all Russia's iron. Western Siberia was becoming a vital component of Russian national economic security. Something like a coherent Petrine economic policy was emerging
*--The following persons were leading supporters of mercantilist policy in Russia’s Eastward expansion, following on Tatishchev:

Ostermann,A.I.
Sukin,FI(Ober-scy SNT)
Nepliuev,I.I.
    Also industrialists and merchants:
Bazhenov,F.I.
Korzhavin,V.N.
Tverdyshev,I.B.

  \\
*--MERSH,9:46-54
*--Hugh Hudson, Jr., Rise of the Demidov Family and the Russian Iron Industry in the Eighteenth Century (1986)
*--Thomas Owen, Russian Corporate Capitalism, chapter 3: "Corporations in the Russian Empire, 1700-1914" (pp. 16-49)

<>1720:Saint Petersburg described [BL&T:17-18]

<>1720fe28:tsar Peter I issued the General Regulation which reformed government procedure. Peter denied himself and his Senate the authority to issue verbal laws. Only written laws recognized

<>1721:Siberian port city Okhotsk [g] was the point of departure for a Russian expedition to find Japan via Kuril Islands [SHJ, 3:202]
*--In these years, 1719-1721, Ivan Evreinov and F. Luzhin completed a geological and cartographic exploration of Kamchatka and the Kuril islands at the furthest NE extreme of Siberia

<>1721ja16:Peter I decree on municipal administration. This reform built on early efforts that had slackened during wartime. Peter returned again to this important institutional/administrative project again before his death [VSB,2:346 and 355-7]

<>1721ja25:Peter I issued "The Spiritual Regulation" for the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church [Excerpts = VSB,2:370-1 | KRR:334-6 | DIR3:34-42]. Orthodox Church Patriarch henceforward was not to be appointed. [Thus the 1700 act could now been given permanent legal sanction.] The Holy Synod was created to assume the role of bureaucratic administration over the Church. This ended the first period in the history of the Russian Patriarchate, the most elevated church institution (132 years). Very soon, Petrine policy went so far as to overturn the 1000-year tradition of symphonia in the relation of princely to clerical authority. Peter was redesigning the relationship of Church and state in Russia
*--This event might be taken to mark the end of the first epoch (1632-1721) of the Raskol [Schism]. The general European evolution of secular culture in the early-modern epoch was reflected also in "Holy Russia". For Russia there would be almost two centuries of ruinous cultural fissure, pitting supposed spiritual traditionalists against evident secularist modernizers. Old-Ritualist alarm peaked in this time. The "Spiritual Regulation" was taken to confirm their belief that Satan and the Anti-Christ were subverting the True Faith (so clearly announced, to their way of thinking, in the astonishing, bigger-than-life person of tsar Peter I)
*--No further significant legislative action was to be taken with respect to the Orthodox Church until after the fall of the Romanov Dynasty and the establishment of Soviet power, when on the one hand the Patriarchate was restored but, on the other, the Petrine secularist legacy (to speak colloquially) was put on steroids
*1723:1729; Thomas Consett described the present state and regulations of the Church of Russia, For God and Peter the Great: The Works of Thomas Consett...
\\
*--Hughes:332-57 (on religion under Peter I)
*--Florovsky,5:116-22
*--Raeff:123-30 summarizes church history, 1682-1825
*--Florinsky,1(15) deals with school and church
*--Serge Bolshakov, Russian Nonconformity: The Story of Unofficial Religion in Russia
*--James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great
*--John Shelton Curtiss, Church and State in Russia: The Last Years of the Empire, 1900-1917 (NYC:1940)
*--Gregory L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (Princeton:1983)

<>1721au20:Sweden and Russia ended the "Great Northern War" with Nystadt Treaty [VSB,2:342| ORW:11]
*--The war was over, but the bills were not yet fully paid. Heavy war-time taxation continued to be a burden [VSB,2:345-53]
*--Sweden lost its bid for status as world power
*--Russian imperialist and frontier expansion, for two decades bogged down in the west and for the time being stymied in the south, made slow recovery in the east

<>1721oc22:Petersburg Trinity Cathedral | Russia commenced formal celebration of the Nystadt Treaty and victory over Sweden. Senate bestowed on tsar Peter I the titles "Emperor", "the Great" and "Father of the Fatherland" [VSB,2:342-3]
*--Peter delivered carefully composed and broadly significant statement of thanks to the nation. He warned against complacency after victory. Byzantium fell for that reason. Russia must now move beyond those praiseworthy accomplishments that brought military victory. Russia must now take up those areas of need neglected in time of war. He outlined a comprehensive plan for post-war transformation of Russian institutional and social life in the direction of relief for the people and quickening of broad economic ties with other nations, a goal he summarized as "utility and gain for all" [pol'za i pribytok obshchii] [N.A.Voskresenskii, Zakonodatel'nye akty...:213-14]. This statement was widely distributed throughout Europe. Peter had only four more years of life, but he here clearly projected another great time of change ahead

<>1722:Russian theologian and imperial political advisor Feofan Prokopovich, "Sermon on Royal Authority.... [Raeff3:14-30 | VSB,2:342-3]
*--Peter the Great's reforms brought the Russian Orthodox Church under direct state administration, in imitation of certain northern European trends and reaching far beyond anything implied in the Byzantine concept of church-state symphonia and thus in direct contradiction with Pope Gelasius's "Letter" which had sought twelve-hundred years earlier to distinguish sharply between the institutions of church and state
\\
*--Florovsky,5:122-48 presents harsh portrait of Prokopovich and his legacy in Russian spiritual life

<>1722ja24:Russian social/service hierarchy was reformed. Ranks of civilian, military, church and royal court service set by Table of Ranks [VSB,2:328-9 | DSD,2:4-14 | KRR:228-9 | DSD,1:4-14 | DIR2:17-19 | DIR3:19]
*--Peter strove to open service careers to people of talent and ability, rather than status. He established a new rational system for rewarding talent (as exercised within state service) and linking it with social status, but he failed to disassemble the old soslovie system. Thus he created a tense and contradictory relationship between civil service rank ("assigned" identity) and inherited social estate [soslovie or "natal" identity (ID)]. The tension compromised the integrity of an already compromised social hierarchy. From the time of Peter I, the Russian social hierarchy (singular) should be thought of as a clumsy amalgam of social/service hierarchies (plural). And while Peter I tried to open things up so that talent could thrive, he refused to grant any broader or spontaneous opening in the stiffly enforced social/service hierarchies. This dysfunctional amalgam shaped Russian political and social history to the very end of the Russian old regime [EG]
*--One outstanding example of Petrine "democracy" was the career of Petr Shafirov, the son of a commoner, a converted Jew. Shafirov met Peter I in the famous "German [foreign] quarter" of Moscow. He joined Peter on the Grand Embassy as a trained and talented diplomatic translator. He rose quickly to become Privy Secretary to Peter, then Director of the Foreign Office, then Vice-Chancellor with the noble title "Baron". Shafirov was a close associate of Menshikov. In 1722, Shafirov was condemned to death by beheading after Menshikov accused him of corruption [!], In the end, Shafirov was sent to Siberia rather than to the scaffold
*--As the Great Northern War came to an end and Peter turned his energies again to neglected "civilian" projects, the Petrine transformation took on new life. Popular reaction intensified
\\
*--Hughes:159-203
*--Raeff:103-122 summarizes social history, 1682-1825
*--Kliuchevskii,4:101-2
*--Blum:463-8 describes the notorious Petrine "soul tax", in which every adult male peasant was responsible, through his village assembly, to pay a set amount to the state. Privileged social estates [ID] were exempt from this tax

<>1724:Russian political-economist and state servitor (of peasant origins) Ivan Pososhkov (1652-1726) wrote a critical analysis of Russian problems and submitted it to Peter I = Book on Poverty and Wealth (not published until 1842). The book criticized raw mercantilist policy [VSB,2:326-7 and 358-61 | KRR:312-18 | DIR2:31-6 | DIR3:42-49]. It does not appear that Peter ever saw Pososhkov's book. The Emperor died in the next year. Pososhkov himself was arrested and, in 1726, died in the Peter-Paul Fortress prison
*--Peter's economic policies had exhausted Russia. Near constant warfare shaped the developing Russian economy. Somewhere between 75% and 80% of all government revenue was spent on war. Taxes rose 100% between 1682 and the outbreak of the Great Northern War
*1724:After a seven-year effort to gather population figures, a primitive census, and a series of "revisions" of those early faulty efforts, Peter introduced the Poll Tax [Head Tax, Soul Tax, podushnaia podat'], the most "regressive" of all taxes, levied equally on all male "souls" [a term that shocked Pososhkov] of the lower or "non-privileged" sosloviia [formal social estates] without regard for ability to pay. Clergy, nobility and merchants were exempted. On the basis of the Poll Tax, state revenue jumped to nearly six times the revenue collected in 1680
*--Mining industry got its start, and iron mills began production. In 1695, there were 17 iron works in Muscovy. At Peter's death, there were 52, and 13 of these were in the Urals, an indication of the importance of frontier expansion to modernization policies. At this time, coal production equaled that of England and iron production was greater. By the reign of Catherine the Great Russia was the world leader in coal production
*--But modernization was largely for weapons, naval fittings, sails and uniforms. Peter laid the foundations of a modernizing industrial economy, but he did so in the form of military mobilization
*--Canals were dug. Foreign trade increased four-fold and exhibited a great favorable balance. But much of this made possible by a military procurement system which emphasized state budgeting, state purchase of production, and outright state ownership of productive enterprises. Between 200 and 300 industries were established in Peter's time, and 43% of them were owned by the government
*--The workforce was pressed into even more severe conditions of unfree labor, of serfdom
*--Alexander Gerschenkron, in Economic Backwardness:17 (a chapter written in 1952), defined a "peculiar series of sequences" which seemed to characterize every attempt to modernize the Russian economy. (1) The state, moved by military needs, assumed the role of propelling agent of economic progress. (2) Therefore, economic development was always linked to military needs. Economic development mirrored the irregular rhythms of war rather than the smoother pace of productive and distributive growth. Economic policy vibrated between panicked wartime crisis and peacetime torpor. (3) Movement in fits and starts meant that great economic burdens were placed on the unfortunate generation which had to "modernize" to support the military needs of their time. (4) In order to assure that this unfortunate generation responded properly to these state needs, severe measures of oppression were necessary to prevent shirking or escape. (5) The long periods of stagnation between military needs were made even deeper and more abysmal since the sacrifices of the crisis period were always so devastating. Gerschenkron doesn't mention it, but it might also be said that this "peculiar series of sequences" suppressed the evolution of a spontaneous cooperation and exchange between state, society and the economy (what some call "civil society" [ID]) and promoted the evolution of social atomization, isolation, and hostility. Especially this last deficiency inspired Ivan Pososhkov's remarkable analysis [above]
*--A weak glimmering of a coherent Petrine economic policy can be seen in the final ten years of his reign, but little was firmly accomplished here at the heart of the great "riddle of backwardness"
\\
*--Hughes:63-92 (on Peter's military/industrial policies)
*--Blum:277-307 (general survey of economic development from Peter I to Alexander II)

<>1725:Bashkir lands contained state zavody [factories] worked by 5422 male serfs. Russia exploited Bashkir steppes in support of economic modernization

<>1725:Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences founded after Peter’s death, but on a plan he ordered [VSB,2:368-9 | DIR2:19-20 | DIR3:21-2 | BL&T:108]
*--Here too, the Petrine transformation was "top heavy"
\\
*--Hughes:298-332 (on education)

<>1725ja28:1762je28; Russia entered a 37-year ERA BETWEEN "GREATS" from the death of Emperor Peter I "the Great" until Empress Catherine II "the Great"

<>1726fe08: Supreme Privy Council [Verkhovnyi tainyi sovet] for a short while became the central autocratic authority [VSB,2:377]
*--Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn (1665:1737) was a major figure in the new Council. Educated in Italy, he served as an ambassador to Turkey in 1701. Between 1711 and 1721, he was governor of the Kievan region (and drew close to the scholarly monks at the spiritual academy there). He was extremely learned, having amassed a personal library of over 6000 books. From 1722 he was a prominent figure in the Petrine Senate (representing a small faction of progressive-minded old boyar nobles). At the death of Peter I, he conspired without success to bring the infant son (also named Peter) to the throne, with the mother, Catherine and the Senate acting as regents
*--A.D. Menshikov joined Golitsyn in the Supreme Privy Council, even though he was a quintessential representative of the new Petrine service elite and in stark contrast to Golitsyn. Legend had it that Peter met Menshikov in Moscow in the time of their youth. Menshikov was a footloose waif who sold pies on Moscow streets. He was a hell-raiser, and that suited Peter exactly. Menshikov in a sense never left Peter's side. Peter appointed him to various high and responsible posts, but he was a notorious thief, embezzler and organized crook. Many times Peter had to slap him down. Once Peter fined him half his whole fortune, which had grown immense through procurement fraud (e.g., pocketing half the budget for military uniforms). Still he remained a millionaire and always able to work his way back from exile into Peter's favor. Now Menshikov conspired with success to have Catherine crowned Empress and thus to avoid a new ascendancy of the Golitsyn crowd behind Peter's infant son on the throne. In this he was supported by certain officers ready to use force if they did not get their way
*--The Council thus combined an unlikely team of old and new elites, with their base in the Senate but with no desire to elevate the Senate to a central position. Rather they preferred an irregular institution through which they could wield personal influence. And Catherine, a serious alcoholic and in all other ways unsuited to the responsibilities of rule, presented them no obstacle. They sought to reverse certain Petrine reforms, to build down some of the unwieldy Petrine institutions. However, they did not want to end the reforms altogether: Continue the modernization, but at a slower pace, an elitist "Senatorial" pace
*--The Petrine transformation, now nearly thirty years under way, was in for some hard years, but the Supreme Privy Council did not last long
\\
*--Hughes:416-45 (on Menshikov and other "new men" elevated to positions under Peter I); 445-71 (legacy of Peter I)
*--Bushkovitch:426:45 (summary of Peter's reign)

<>1727:Siberia | Kiakhta Treaty between Russia and China continued cooperative relations among these two powers on the Siberian frontier, but China moved with vigor on its own southern frontier =
*1727:TIBET in grip of struggle between secular and religious authorities. The Chinese Emperor imposed his military authority over region
*1764:Dublin. John Bell's travel account describes some of these events [excerpt in Lensen,Eastward:49-51]

<>1728:Moscow | Bashkir delegation led by Yarnei Yanchurin. Bashkir steppe brought under more regular Russian administration when Ufa guberniia was separated from Kazan. Ufa region called "provintsiia" under authority of Senate. Population there not required to render military service

<>1730ja19:Russian Senatorial party, led by Dmitrii Golitsyn, imposed "Conditions" on Empress Anna [TXT] [Raeff2:44-52 | VSB,2:378 | DIR2:36-43 | DIR3:49-56]
*--The Conditions imposed the following restrictions on Anna's power. Each prohibition implied a concluding phrase "...on her own arbitrary authority" =
    1. Not to start war with anyone
    2. Not to conclude peace
    3. Not to burden loyal subjects with new taxes
    4a. Not to promote individuals to the sixth or higher rungs of the Table of Ranks, and
    4b. To hand over command of Guard and other elite regiments to the Supreme Privy Council
    5. Not to deprive nobles of life, property or honor without trial
    6. Not to grant patrimonial estates [votchiny] and villages [in serf bondage]
    7. Not to promote individuals to court service positions
    8. Not to spend state revenue
*1730fe28:1740; Russian Empress Anna assumed the throne, tore up "Conditions", abolished the Supreme Privy Council, restored the Governing Senate, and decreed autocracy restored. She reigned for ten years
*--Favorites Bühren [Biron], Ostermann, & Münnich [Mennikh] [spelled here in the Germanic way to emphasize their family origins] were much resented among Russian noble elite. These figures made some Russians nostalgic for Golitsyn and Menshikov. Menshikov's long career as Peter's graft ridden crony was now balanced in some minds with the fact that he was "Russian" and that the Petrine legacy was evaporating altogether in an era of national slump and opportunistic elitism. A further factional division widened between those, like Golitsyn, who represented the civilian face of the Petrine legacy, and those, like Münnich, who represented the military face
*--Anna introduced many measures to ease the plight of grandee nobles (without much improving the status of rural gentry) [VSB,2:378-81] The statist quality of this "noble renaissance" is shown by the following = In 1736,  Dmitrii Golitsyn was arrested for malfeasance in office. In prison he soon died. His great library was confiscated and parceled out
*--Russian statesman V.N. Tatishchev published "...Assembled Russian Nobility about the State Government" [DSD,1:15-27]
\\
*--Florinsky,1(16) deals with the eras of Empresses Anna and Elizabeth
*--Miner Curtis, A Forgotten Empress: Anna Ivanovna and Her Era, 1730-1740. NYC:1974
*--Philip Longworth, Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Elite of 1730

<>1730:Bashkir lands in western Siberian steppes [g] administered by A.P. Volynskii who opposed the idea of an independent territory. He was antagonistic toward the Muslim faith, but his concept was at heart imperialist rather than religious. He built more fortresses, refurbished old. Mapped the region. Exploited Bashkir territory, claiming the right of a superior civilization
\\
*--Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800

<>1730c:Siberia, Kamchatka Peninsula [g] | Russian Academy of Sciences explorer Stepan Krasheninnikov described indigenous rebellion observed during the first Kamchatka expedition  [Lensen,Eastward:30-3]
*--Stepan Krasheninikov, Explorations of Kamchatka, North Pacific scimitar; report of a journey made to explore eastern Siberia in 1735-1741, by order of the Russian Imperial Government
*1731:1733; Ivan Kirilov organized second Kamchatka expedition, revived Petrine mercantilist concept. Closer to home =
*1731:Petersburg-Lake Ladoga canal, started by Peter I, was finally completed

<>1732:Russian government ordered Vitus Bering to explore Siberian waters for Japan. It was now clear that Asia terminated in the far NE at the shores of the straits now called "Bering Straits" [DIR3:143-7]

<>1734:1737; Siberia, southern Ural Mountains [g] | Vasilii Tatishchev dispatched to create more zavody [factory strong points]. Much success. Used authority to restrict zavody run by individual "entrepreneurs"
*--The mercantilist state needed metals from these mines and found it best if it ran the mines and zavody itself
*--Shifted administration of yasak [tax tribute] from yasak officials to Bashkir elders. For over 400 years, since Mongol times, yasak taxation was characteristic
*1734:Siberia, southern Ural Mountains| The Orenburg expedition created, extending Russian power further into Bashkir lands. Orenburg situated at confluence of Ori & Ural rivers [g]. Ivan Kirilov led expedition [Demikova,NF in SIE,10:608 lists no particular scholar attached to this expedition]. Fortress settlements founded as strong point for Cossack and Kalmyk allies
*--Orenburg received many exemptions from usual imperial restrictions. Other nationalities could live there. Christians, Muslims and other faiths were not excluded. These forts were to serve as strong points and retreats for Cossack, Kalmyk and other allies in the struggle against the Kazakh Tatars [the KIR-Kaisets] who roamed the region from the Altai highlands to Bukhara south of the Aral Sea
*--This was an era of near constant war with the Bashkirs, but also a time of growing contact with them. Bashkirs no longer sought to create Islamic unity in their regions, but they still feared for their land. All the Russian concessions, including a degree of self-government, left the land question open. Indeed the land surrounding Orenburg was taken from them. Russian factories spread into the Ekaterinburg region. All forests fell under imperial control. The official goal may have been trade, but the military ways from the Peter-I era influenced Russian behavior and put the Bashkirs on an oppositional footing

<>1735:1736; Bashkir leader Kil'miak-Abyz led a rebellion in an effort to protect Bashkir lands from Russian expansion
*--Aleksandr Rumiantsev was sent to put down the rebellion with Russian troops mustered from Perm and other Siberian factories under Tatishchev's management
*1736:The rebellion was crushed. The lands of rebels were taken. Other native peoples who had not rebelled were invited to share in the spoils, e.g., the Meshcheriaki who had earlier rented lands from the Bashkirs. All those who came over to the Russian side and became pioneers along the line of Russian forts were officially designated "peasants". This was the bottom of the formal imperial social hierarchy [sosloviia] but it was a form of social generosity unusual among European colonial powers in their dealings with indigenous peoples. And the door was left open for Bashkirs to accept a similar offer

<>1736:Persian (Iranian) Safavid dynasty at an end

<>1736ap25:Russian decree against fleeing peasant serfs [DIR2:125-6 | DIR3:140]

<>1737:Siberian Department established to administer imperialist expansion to the Pacific Ocean
*--Bering and Steller charted the northern Siberian coastline

<>1737ap14:Siberia, Orenburg | Kirilov dismissed. Later directors of the Orenburg Expedition in Bashkir territory =
*1737:1739; Vasilii Tatishchev
*1739:1742; V.A. Urusov [noBrE]
*1742:1744; I.I. Nepliuev (44:60; Governor)

<>1738:Russian ballet school founded in Petersburg

<>1738:Bering's first expedition into Siberian waters in search of Japan. It was slow going, but then =
*1739je27:Japan, Amatsu village, Awa Province (Chiba Prefecture) | Second expedition of Vitus Bering disembarked from its Siberian port, led by Martin Petrovich Spanberg (Danish by birth), William Walton, and Aleksei Il'ich Chirikov. They located Japan & went ashore briefly. Spanberg, Walton & Chirikov reported, but they were not believed back home
*--The expedition was sighted by the Japanese off Shimoda (later one of USA Commodore Matthew Perry's ports) [Sansom,WWJ:213]
*--Behind and just out of sight of all this official exploration, an on-going unofficial Russian contact had been established and kept up with the Ainu (indigenous peoples, now driven to the northernmost extreme by Japanese frontier expansion in the Kuril Islands) & with Japanese in Kurils [ibid:213]
\\
Lensen,Russian Push:50-5

<>1738:1739; Russian-Turkish war, ending in the Treaty of Beograd [Serbia, Belgrade]. Russia gained dominion over the northern Black Sea coastline

<>1741:1745; Lower reaches of the Volga River, at the western edge of the Bashkir steppes, near Tsaritsyn (Volgograd; Stalingrad] [g]) | Astrakhan Governor Vasilii Tatishchev "pacified" Kalmyk people. Tatishchev was a severe but able Siberian frontier administrator whose career spanned two decades

<>1741:1762; Russian Empress Elizabeth [Elizaveta] [VSB,2:381-8 | DIR2:44-50 | DIR3:57-63] reigned for 21 years
*--Survey SAC chronology of her reign for indications of great imperialist expansion and cultural accomplishment, a certain grandee splendor centered on the isolated "gated community" of the capital city Petersburg, but perhaps deserving of the label "Enlightened"
\\
James F. Brennan, Enlightened Despotism in Russia: The Reign of Elisabeth, 1741-1762 (1987)

<>1741jy:Russian expedition [I], commanded by Vitus Bering, made Alaskan "new world" landing on small island within sight of Mt. St. Elias. Two centuries of Siberian expansion and ten years of exploration by Bering were now crowned by a remarkable "discovery" of North America from Asia. The leap over the north Pacific opened a new era for Siberia [MAP] [MAP]
*--On this expedition, naturalist Steller confirmed sighting New World beyond Siberian waters, from northern Pacific. Presence there of a certain blue jay--now called the Steller's Jay--reinforced his conclusion
*--For the next 125 years, Russia & America both experienced new-world frontier expansion. Alaska became the great Russian/American shared imperialist/colonial adventure
\\
READINGS ON RUSSIAN/US PACIFIC RIM FRONTIER:
*--Decent narrative, with excellently clear maps and fine photos, describe Russia in the New World [W]
*--Howard I. Kushner, Conflict on the Northwest Coast: American-Russian Rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867  See ch.6:"The Oregon Question and Russian-America."
*--John J. Stephan & V. P. Chichkanov, eds., Soviet-American Horizons on the Pacific
*--Hector Chevigny, Russian America: The Great Alaskan Venture, 1741-1867
*--George V.Lantzeff  and R. A. Pierce, Eastward to Empire: Exploration and Conquest on the Russian Open Frontier to 1750
*--Glynn Barratt, Russian Shadows on the British Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1890: A Study of Rejection of Defence Responsibilities (1983) F1088.B25)
*--Foster Rhea Dulles, Russia and America: Pacific Neighbors (1946) 327.7347 D888r
*--Stuart Ramsay Tompkins, Alaska: Promyshlennik and Sourdough (1945)
*--S. B. Okun, The Russian American Company (Cambridge MA:1951)
*--Starr, ed., Russia's American Colony

Alaska: A shared frontier

1895:Alaska, Sitka | St. Michael's Russian Orthodox Church
[source]

<>1742ja02:Russian Senate issued decree appointing missionaries to Kamchatka to convert the Kamchadal people to Orthodox Christianity [DIR3:147-8]
*1742:Siberia, southern piedmont of the Ural Mountains | Orenburg fortress moved to today's location where it quickly became the command center for Russian SE military frontier and imperialist expansion

<>1744:ORN gbx fnd on basis of ORN.xpd. Nepliuev,IvIv (x.ORN.xpd dtr) now 1st gbxor. Main authority over BSH & KZX [KIR] steppe. Nepliuev sought mfg & skz clnists "no pri etom on vstreqal prepyatstviya, gluboko korenivwiyasya v togdawnem obwwestvennom i gosudarstvennom stroe Rossii. Kolonizatsiya rus. okrain vsegda wla pomimo pravitel'stva i daje v razrez s ustanovlennymi im poryadkami....". clnists usually were "gulyawwie lyudi" IE:fugitives, beglye frm srfom txx mlt.srv & rlg. gbxor cldn't condone this. SO 1st sought friendly TTR or Xtx.Kalmyks. KZN TTR~ better bcs of INX in trd. Built water mills, cotton & plant soroqinskoe pweno. cldn't attract RUS (merchant)--too bdn, but also RUS grd.pbl buduqi obyazany otpravlyat' raznye povinnosti i slujby, kotorye oni nesli vsem mirom, vsyaqeski protivilis' vyxodu iz sredy svoei soqlenov, tak kak vyxodom odnix neminuemo uveliqivalis' tyagoty ostal'nyx. ?Parallel w krp in oxo?. gtx more sig., but "eto byli elementy, ves'ma maloprigodnye dlya vneseniya v dikii krai naqal grajdanstvennosti i promywlennosti" [?very best? Australia?] Ttw wanted to welcome fugitives but not allowed to do so; only UKR fugitives allowed but 1742:SPB TSR ElizPetr stopped acceptance of UKR fugitives [BrE, 5:228??]

<>1746ja13:Ukz motivated by Nepliuev=All nepomnyawwix rodstva & gnt allowed gt.ORN to rcv lnd & 3y xmt frm txx & mlt.srv. Nepliuev tried to free grn frm stt, but to prevent monopolies (!?) These bought srf~ to wrk zvd~:
Miasnikov (merchant)
Tveryshev (merchant)
Sivers (merchant)
Shuvalov graf
Stroganov
Demidov,N
Mosolov
Osokin

<>1749:1754; ORN Menovoi dvor & Gostinyi dvor fnd. txx.trf.tUt there for trd w/KZX & CAS

<>1747:French provincial political theorist Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu [W] published his most important political tract, De l'esprit des lois [The Spirit of Laws] [W] [excerpts]. This was a comparative study of politics, almost "social-scientific" in its presumption of the need for empirical data. The book was thus a good example of new ways of thinking in the European "Enlightenment". It described three forms of government, republic ["res" "publica", the instrument of the public], aristocracy [the rule of the well-born], and despotism [rule of the single towering individual]. Montesquieu had a great talent for political theory, and his study continued from this time forward to have a powerful influence on world opinion. But he also had considerable executive experience within his own regional version of that peculiar French institution of local aristocratic self-government, the  parlement of Bordeaux. Theory and experience mixed well in this brilliant essay. No surprise, he preferred aristocracy

<>1751:TIBET under Chinese imperialist authority. Secular government of Tibet abolished in favor of reign of the Dali Llama and his spiritual council.

<>1753oc13:Russian Senate Ukaz supported 1746ja13:Ukaz in support of Nepliuev's effort to protect the Bashkir indigenous votchina [patrimony] and its native peoples from imposition of Russian military obligations and Orthodox Christianization [PSZ#10141 |  1871:RAr#4-5. Nepliuev zapiski]
*1754:1757; Bashkir rebellion could not be prevented. Meshcheriak Batyrsh [Batarma in BrE BXO/Nepliuev] Aleev, talented organizer & Muslim scholar and mullah was finally defeated and arrested (further fate unknown). Fifty thousand Bashkir fled into Kazakh/Kirghiz steppe wilderness to the south [g]
*1755:Orenburg Cossack militia created [Orenburgskoe kazach'e voisko]. This new frontier militia was made up of Samara, Alekseevsk, Ufa, & Isetsk Cossacks. These were supplemented with soldiers in the frontier military, peasant Bashkir/Meshcher, Kalmyk, Ukrainian and Don River Cossacks
*--The Russian state was moving to bring some control over Cossack military units and to move them all in a SE direction into frontier territories, further from the imperialist "metropol" (the urban, managerial center of expansionist policy) and deeper into the Russian "periphery" (the remote territories managed from the metropol). Like the USA cavalry, the Orenburg militia was the forceful "cutting edge" of frontier advancement into indigenous people's territories
*--By 1768 the Orenburg Cossacks numbered 13,700, of whom 4,700 served in the new tsarist Cossack military
*--Russian imperialist frontier in the SE was consolidated, but in the west complications again intervened
\\
SIE minimizes Aleev role

<>1755:Moscow University established according to Ivan Shuvalov proposal [VSB,2:388-9; BL&T:112f]
*--In these years "Russian" high culture -- a Russian secular civilization -- was born
\\
*--Raeff:131-58 summarizes intellectual life, 1682-1825
*--J. L. Black, Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators, and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth Century Russia (East European Monographs no. 53, 1979)
*----------. G. F. Muller and the Imperial Russian Academy (1986)
*--J. L. Black, ed. Essays on Karamzin: Russian Men of Letters, Political Thinkers, Historians, 1766-1826 (1975)
*--Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (NYC:1966) [HT647.R3]
*--Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge MA:1960

<>1755:Russian scholar Mikhail Lomonosov (-1765), Russian Grammar. Lomonosov sometimes called the Russian Benjamin Franklin (just as the Russians might call Franklin the American Lomonosov). Here are some Lomonosov writings =
*--"Panegyric...." [Raeff3:32-48]
*--Refutation of "Normanist" historical theory which claimed that in 862:Vikings founded Russian state [DIR2:52-5 | DIR3:64-8]
*--More [BL&T:109f]
*1753my10:SPB. Letter on poor poets [GPR:618-20]
*1753my31:SPB. Letter on electrical experiments [GPR:620-23]
\\
*--Wagar on Lomonosov [TXT]
*--Kudriavtsev, The Life and Work of Lomonosov (MVA:1954) [UO]
*--B. N. Menshutkin, Russia's Lomonosov: Chemist, Courtier, Physicist, Poet (Princeton NJ:1952)

<>1755:Saint Petersburg | In the face of increasingly complex budgetary needs of an expanding empire, a new tax structure [Tamozhennyi ustav] introduced, replacing Ordyn-Nashchokin’s 1667:Novotorg.ustav [ID]

<>1756:1763; New World English and French colonial holdings (future USA and Canada) | Armies of England and France fought the "Old War" in the "New World" (often called the French-Indian War)
*1759se13:French Canadian stronghold Quebec fell to English armies. The days of French imperialist dominion over the New World were numbered, but none imagined at this time that a new and independent nation, rather than England, would succeed France in all of its vast territories in the southern and central region of North America, the Mississippi River basin
*1761:Governor Glen, "The Role of the Indians in the rivalry Between France, Spain and England" [W]
*1762:Native American indigenous religious/military prophet and leader Neolin was of the Delaware tribe. He called on mystic powers to defeat the modern armies of imperialist Europe. His actions prefigured later Ghost Dance [ID]
*1763ap27:New World colonies (future USA & Canada), French Canada, Detroit [French for "the narrows"] of Lake Superior | Great meeting of indigenous American tribes that formed up the Iroquois confederacy. Pontiac emerged as military leader
*1763my:Detroit Fort | After France surrendered fort to England, the indigenous American tribes demanded supplies, as promised by their ally England. War broke out, at first going the way of the tribes. Native Americans captured the fort. England supplied natives with small-pox infested blankets
*1763au:Battle of Bushy Run | England defeated indigenous leader Pontiac
*1763fa:War against Pontiac ended. Pontiac fled into IL. He was later assassinated
*--UO website maps: 1783:Native American tribes and 1783:European possessions bordering rebellious colonies
*--More on Native Americans
\\
*--An assessment of the role of indigenous Native Americans [W] in this struggle
*--USA Boston historian Francis Parkman devoted much of his scholarly life to an explanation of why England prevailed in North America. Is it English capitalist culture (plus Parkman’s Boston-style sense of racial superiority) vs. French mercantilism (plus Parkman’s presumption of Latino laxity)? How does this relate to Parkman’s 1846:trip to the KS, WY, & CO prairies, which he commemorated in the grandly and deceptively titled The California and Oregon Trail
*--Parkman account influenced by novelist James Fenimore Cooper & by Augustin Thierry, a historian of the 1066:Norman conquest of England. It is a story of the victory of a superior race over a lesser race, as Parkman described it in his autobiographical novel Vassal Morton (CF.Jacobs,Parkman:46f)

<>1756:1763; In Europe the "French-Indian War" in the New World was but one front in a vast imperialist war, at first fought among native peoples in imperialized lands. It now boomeranged and embroiled Europe in what is called the Seven Years War, a struggle between conflicting principles of old mercantilism and novel capitalism)
*--In this war, dynastic rivalries of limited significance quickly ignited conflict of vast implication. The British East India Co. (as it eventually came to be known) was able to neutralize the French East India Co. and limit its schemes to the Mississippi Valley. French imperialist colonialism in the New World was doomed
*--This war bore hints of European catastrophes to come. Imperialist rivalry in distant lands threatened war in the European homeland. Brutal policies and practices overseas were coming home. Certain proud European states that seemed to be losing out in the overseas imperialist scramble sought advantages closer at hand [e.g., France after 1799 and Germany in 1914; perhaps Russia after 1945]

<>1760oc:Russian armies captured Berlin [g] as Seven Years War intensified
*1762:New Russian Emperor Peter III signed Treaty of Saint Petersburg with the new waxing power in Central Europe, Prussia. The new Emperor was an infamous Prussophile
*--The larger geo-political significance of this war lay in the fact that Russian and Prussian power waxed stronger while the overseas imperial powers, England, France and Spain grabbed at one another's throats. Spain was already an empire in precipitous decline. France was about to be forced to sell a big chunk of its New World empire in order to finance a newly exploding European continental empire [ID]
*--Hostility was settled and friendship restored between the two ascendant powers, Russia and Prussia; this over the bodies of the now immobilized but once powerful Sweden and soon-to-be partitioned Poland
*--Blunders of other European imperialist powers thus encouraged Russian imperialist ambition
\\
*--Herbert H. Kaplan, Russia at the Outbreak of the Seven Years' War (Berkeley CA:1968) [DD411.5.K3]
*--Florinsky,1(17):especially 474-80

<>1760de13:Russian gentry landlords empowered by decree to exile troublesome serfs to Siberia [VSB,2:391]

<>1762:Swiss-born French-language philosopher, social theorist and musician Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712:1778) published his most mature and influential piece of political analysis, Contrat social [The Social Contract]
*1749:Earlier, the Dijon Academy brought first fame to Rousseau when it awarded its prize to his essay on how civilization always corrupts the natural goodness of humanity. Five years later =
*1754:Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité des hommes [Discourse on the origin of inequality among humans] made an extended and more complex (maybe even occasionally contradictory) statement on his prize-winning theme. Eight years passed =
*1762:Contrat social pulled it all together. What is popularly called "the noble savage" was just naturally good. High civilization made him bad. "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains" was an oft-quoted Rousseau phrase. Ancient agricultural civilization was as much at fault as later industrialization and universal concepts of private property. So Rousseau did not seek to "return to nature". He was not in essence "reactionary". He was "radical" in the sense that he looked forward to a new way of life that would as nearly as possible recapture the human birthright of simplicity and goodness. The most radical idea was that all political and social sovereignty had to reside with the people. However, the people had to commit themselves to a "social contract", had to bind themselves to an elusive thing he called "The General Will".
*--Rousseau is thought of as an originator of European "Romanticism", with its emphasis on free expression of spontaneous, essential, "natural" and largely emotional truths of human consciousness, unspoiled by artificial "high-brow" rationalized sophistication
*--The complete and complex Rousseau legacy is suggested in the 10+ volume English-language edition of his Works

<>1762fe07:Peter III began "emancipation" of gentry [pomeshchik noble landowners] from obligatory state service [VSB,2:391-2 | DIR2:55-8 | DIR3:69-72]
*--Manifesto on freedom of nobility [KRR:230-2 | DSD,1:28-35]

<>1762je28:1796; CATHERINE II "THE GREAT" [Ekaterina Velikaia]
She reigned for 34 years through one of the most dramatic epochs in European history =
     EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT and FRENCH REVOLUTION
*1762jy12:English ambassador reported on the coup d'état that resulted in Peter III's murder and brought Catherine to the Russian throne [WRH]
*1762au:Russian Empress Catherine II described the coup in a letter to Poniatowski [WRH | DIR2:59-64 | DIR3:73-8]
*--Manifesto on ascending throne [WRH]
*--Catherine II, Empress of Russia. The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
*--William Tooke, View of the Russian Empire...(1799) [Excerpts:VSB,2:428-31; WRH3:206] One of the first "professional Russian experts"; also a source of first-hand information on everyday life in Catherine's time
*--Erich Donnert, Russia in the Age of Enlightenment (1985)
*--Sources on everyday life of Catherine and in her court in the early years [VSB,2:395-403]
*--William F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great (1931) [ORBIS OSU]
\\
*--Florinsky,1(19)&(23)
*--John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend ["ACG" hereafter]
*--Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great
*--Marc Raeff, ed. Catherine the Great: A Profile (1972) [ORBIS OSU]
*--Raeff:69-76 compares Peter I's and Catherine II's institutional reforms
*--David Ransel, The politics of Catherinian Russia: the Panin Party
*--Kazimierz Waliszewski, The Romance of an Empress: Catherine Second of Russia (reprint of famous anti-Russian, misogynist  biography)

<>1762jy03:Catherine's first official act was against the wide-spread peasant presumption that Peter III's emancipation of nobles from state service meant that peasants need no longer serve their landlords. She decreed "that each and every person be protected in the enjoyment of his well-earned property and his rights, and, conversely, that no one step beyond the bounds of his rank and his office, we therefore intend to protect the landlords in their estates and possessions inviolably and to keep the peasants in their proper submission to them". Three months later, a second such decree followed, further binding serfs [VSB,2:449-50]
*--Twenty-three years later, Catherine took bolder steps than Peter III. She seemed to grant even greater independence to noble gentry landlords

<>1762de28:Russian statesman Count Nikita Panin penned influential memos on imperial governance [Raeff2:54-68]
*--Catherine II waged a struggle against corruption [VSB,2:451-2]

<>1763jy22:Catherine II invited foreigners (largely German-speaking Mennonites) to settle in Russia north of the Black Sea (the Pontic steppes) and along the middle Volga [W#1] [W#2]
*--Volga Germans [W]
*--Mennonites [W] [VSB,2:450-1]
*--Germans from Russia genealogical website [W] Germans from Russia Heritage Society [W] Kansas Historical Society site [W]
*--Sidney Heitman Germans from Russia in Colorado Study Project [W]
\\
*1974:Norman Saul four-part internet article on Mennonites in Kansas [W#1] [W#2] [W#3] [W#4]

<>1764:Catherine II confiscated Russian Orthodox Church lands

<>1764:Fedor Emin published his Moral Fables

<>1764:Russian Empress Catherine II, instructions on functions of Prokurator-General [DSD,1:36-43]
*--In this same year, she purchased a fabulous collection of art and created a museum connected with the recently completed Winter Palace in Petersburg. She named the museum the "Hermitage" [W]

<>1765:English ambassador described Catherine II [WRH]

<>1765:Russian Free Economic Society [VEO] founded
*--Sponsored essay contests on questions like serfdom [VSB,2:461-2] VEO once awarded a prize to an essay which recommended emancipation of serfs
*--Statistics about the Russian rural economy of the 18th century [KRR:268-72]
\\
*--Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-century Russia (1985)

<>1765ja17:Russian decree on exile & hard labor for peasant serfs [VSB,2:453 | DIR2:126 | DIR3:141]
*--This year the Senate gave instructions on potato growing [VSB,2:452-3]

<>1766de14:Catherine II decree established the Legislative Commission [VSB,2:405-6]
*--Catherine then issued her Nakaz [Instructions] to the Commission and invited certain others to do the same
*--Catherine's own account of the Commission [VSB,2:403]
*--The Commission met with little concrete results until 1774, in the months after the rise of the Pugachev Rebellion
\\
*--Florinsky,1(21)
*--19th c. historical description of Commission by Sergei Solov'ev, RRC2,2:256f

<>1767:Honda Toshiaki(1744:1821; ) orx'd scl which reflected his interest in sea nvy mth NED lng, esp.problems of Hokkaido. Went to sea in North, in command of small coastal vessel. pst on shipping, zpd conditions, natural resources. \Keisei Hisaku\(Secret Plan of Government) proposed stt control of mfg, trd, shipping. Also MPR plan, colonization. Opposed JPN closed ekn, favored irx.trd, esp. w/RUS. Supported construction of sea-going merchant marine [Sansom, WWJ:232] A "zpdik" so to speak

<>1767:Russian Orthodox Church’s monastic property nationalized and clergy became civil servants

<>1767jy19:Russian Empress Catherine II issued her Nakaz [Instructions] to Legislative Commission [TXT] [DSD,2 | Briefer in RRC2,2:252f | VSB,2:403 | DIR2:64-88 | DIR3:79-94]
*--Catherine also invited certain social groups to draft "instructions" and to select delegates to the Commission. Those invited can be classified as nobles, merchants, certain clergy, Cossacks and smattering of "free" townspeople and other servile social groups directly attached to state institutions. About one half of all Russian serfs -- about half the whole Russian population -- were attached to institutions rather than to individual gentry aristocrats. Catherine did not invite delegates from the other half the population of the Empire, "privately owned" ("gentry owned") serfs. However, many not invited joined those who were. See the 20 examples of "instructions" submitted to the Commission, translated in FFS:17-84; also see VSB,2:431-41
*1768:The Legislative Commission addressed sensitive issues. Russian government, according to S.E. Desnitskii, should be structured in Legislative, Judicial & Executive branches. A. Ya. Polenov expressed his opinion on serfs [DSD,1:44-88]
*--Catherine did not encourage any specific tinkering with established social/service hierarchies. Serfdom might be a topic, but the enforced categorization of the overwhelming majority of the population in the social estate "peasantry" was not. Nor was there any serious attention to the stiff service categories of the Table of Ranks. However "enlightened" her Nakaz, it still favored the privileged sosloviia [formal social classes or estates]. The three privileged sosloviia were the most important of those invited to send delegates to participate in deliberations of the Legislative Commission =
*--Traditional Russian law recognized three privileged social estates [sosloviia] = clergy, nobility, and merchants. The two "common" sosloviia were petty urbanites [meshchan'e, sometimes posadniki] and peasants [privately owned serfs, state owned serfs and a smattering of "free" villagers] Traditional law sought to distinguish and control the relationships among and between these sosloviia, and to enforce privileges, exemptions, and duties among them, especially those that regulated their relationships to state power. While these were in a sense "natal" or inherited social estates, they had, by the late medieval period, become creatures of state definition and maintenance [EG]. Then Peter the Great's Table of Ranks [ID] positioned state power more firmly than ever over the social structure and further compromised the practical significance of natal identity within the sosloviia

<>1767au22:Catherine II's Senate issued decree prohibiting complaints by serfs [VSB,2:453-4]
*--In these years Russian serf-owning gentry aristocrats issued instructions on management of everyday life on their estates [VSB,2:441-9 | KRR:292-4 | DSD,1:89-110] =
  Petr Rumiantsev
  P. B. Sheremetev
  Ivan Shuvalov
  Vladimir Orlov
  P. I. Rychkov
  A. T. Bolotov
*--Catherine's au22 decree is sometimes taken to represent the lowest point in the history of serf legislation
\\
*--Blum:442-74 describes the various forms of serf obligation owed officials and gentry elites, including barshchina (labor dues) and obrok (quit-rent, a monetary obligation, sometimes satisfied with a portion of village agricultural production)
*--Robinson,ch1 (Serfdom and peasant wars) & ch2 ("The triumph of the servile system")

<>1768:1774; Ottoman Turks and Russia at war
\\
*--Florinsky,1:514-26

<>1769:1772; Russian publisher Nikolai Novikov wrote satirical pieces for his journals, Truten' [The Drone] and Zhivopisets [The Artist] [VSB,2:462-4]
*1769je06:SPB. Novikov wrote a clever letter to the publisher [whom the small "reading public" knew to be Catherine II] of popular satirical journal [GPR:625-7 | DIR3:94-6] Catherine seemed to enjoy the game of journalistic polemics, seemed to encourage bold and clever expression of opinion. She took this to be a characteristic of enlightened public opinion
*1770ja:Novikov's thoughts on the nature of Russian society [DIR3:96-9]
\\
*--W. Gareth Jones, Nikolay Novikov: Enlightener of Russia (1984)
*--Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800 (1985)

<>1770:1771; Kamchatka Peninsula | Moritz Alader Benyowsky (various spellings) Hungarian political refugee, fled by sea, put in at Ryukyu Island. He wrote a letter to a Dutch captain at Nagasaki in which he falsely reported that Russians had fortress on Kurils, amunition, artillery, magazine in readiness. Russia, he said, planned attack Matsumae (Hokkaido) and near-by islands. The letter was translated & sent to Tokugawa government
*--At this time Japanese specialists on the Netherlands expanded their studies to include Russian language
\\
*--Togawa"Russian and Slavic":2
*--PH&G:767
*--Sansom,WWJ:213

<>1771:Moscow urban disorder in connection with the plague [KRR:318-21]

<>1772:England decided that slavery at home was not supported by English law. Soon England's 15,000 slaves would be free
*--It was another half century [ID] before England backed away from its own, and took a hostile position against others', lucrative "off shore" slavery

<>1772:Paris | Encyclopédie; ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, [Encyclopedia; or Rational Dictionary of Scholarship, Science, Arts and Crafts], the great publication project of the European Enlightenment came to completion in 28 volumes (soon supplemental volumes and an index were issued), under editor Denis Diderot
*--Catherine II supported Diderot's publication and corresponded with major Enlightenment figures [VSB,2:408-10], including the senior and greatest philosophe of them all, Voltaire. In his "English Letters" he acknowledged the profound influence exerted by Isaac Newton and the emerging scientific revolution in thought [W with biography & link to "English Letters"] [W] [W] [W] [W] [W] [W] [W]
*--Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence (1974)
*--Voltaire wrote an ambitious study of Russia Under Peter the Great
*--Jean-Jacques Rousseau was another enduring influence on the age of Enlightenment, and thereafter
\\
*-- Wagar defines Enlightenment [TXT], then the Russian Enlightenment in particular [6-paragraph TXT]

<>1772:1775; Poland experienced the first of three partitions at the hands of Prussia, Austria and Russia [DIR2:89-93 | DIR3:100-103]
*1795:Polish territories absorbed into Russia by the end of this two-decade process included a population of Jews larger than anything Russia had hitherto experienced. The Jewish "Pale of Settlement" restricted this population to designated locations, except when state permission was granted to live elsewhere. This represented a variation on recognizable European imperialist policies of population concentration and frontier development (without the "removal")
\\
*--Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (1964)
*--S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (1916-20) Consult Dubnow's index
*--Herbert H. Kaplan, The First Partition of Poland (1962)
*--Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, The Tsars and the Jews ... 1772-1917 (1993)
*--Jerzy Lukowski, Liberty's Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697-1795 (1991)
*--Iw. Pogonowski, Poland: A Historical Atlas ()
*--P. S. Wandycz. The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918 (1974)

<>1773mr02:USA Boston | Lamps fueled by whale oil for the first time illuminated streets. Tallow candles made of Sperm Whale oil by this time lighted many public places and homes
*--The earliest squeaks of the Industrial Revolution were stilled by whale oil, and urban darkness was first pushed back by the same. From this time until the second half of the 19th century we have the first oil age, a whale-oil age. This first age of energy politics, 1712-1872 (160 years), can be divided into three “whale-oil” phases =
*1712:1780; Nantucket Island the center of first phase of the “whale-oil age” for 68 years. This age centered on the American whaling industry and concentrated on the Sperm Whale. The Sperm whale was, pound for pound, the most profitable of the great “fishes” (actually mammals), with their rich oil, spermaceti and ambergris (used in fine perfumes and costing up to $400/ounce in the 19th c.)
*--The New World [USA] whale fisheries were in the hands of a nearly independent “city-state” or, more precisely, “island-state”, Nantucket. The little, low, sandy island just south of Cape Cod was managed by Quaker seamen whose domain stretched around the global high seas and whose “loyalties” were oriented there rather than toward the mainland colonial states
*--The Revolutionary War destroyed the USA whaling industry, even though Nantucket whalers worked hard to protect their neutrality throughout the hostilities. The whalers sought neutrality, but they were largely “Tory” = They remained gently loyal to English colonial authority and did not support the American Revolution. The brief second phase of the “whale-oil age” altered that picture

<>1773oc05:1774mr23; Siberian frontier fortress Orenburg under siege by rebel army commanded by Russian Old Ritualist Cossack Emeliano Pugachev
*--This rebellion was soon named after its leading figure, Pugachev, who was soon issuing decrees and other official acts [TXTs] [VSB,2:454-5]
*--Pugachev claimed to be Peter III, miraculously  alive eleven years after conspirators murdered him and elevated the "German woman" Catherine to the throne [DSD,1:111-35]
*--The rebellion expanded and swept up all elements of discontent on the Kalmyk, Kazakh & Bashkir steppes
*--Gaining support from discontented peasants, especially those threatened by serfdom, the movement expanded up the Volga drainage toward the heart of Russia
*--Pugachev received petitions that described popular discontent [FFS:84-86]
*--Krest'ianskaia voina [...] na territorii Bashkirii: Sbornik dokumentov
\\
*--Florinsky,1(22)
*--Kolchin:246-50
*--Aleksandr S. Pushkin, The History of Pugachev (1983)
*--John T. Alexander, Autocratic Politics in a National Crisis (1969)
*----------. Emperor of the Cossacks: Pugachev and the Frontier Jacquerie of 1773-1775 (1973)
*--Blum:551-60 describes frequent peasant rebellions

<>1773de12:Russian imperial decree against Pugachev [WRH| DIR2:94-6 | DIR3:104-106]

<>1774jy10:Ottoman Turks and Russia signed Kuchuk Kainardji treaty [VSB,2:406-7| DIR2:97-107 | DIR3:107-113]
*--Imperial Russia’s hand was forced by the Pugachev rebellion. Military force had to be diverted from the Ottoman front and sent against Pugachev along the Volga frontier. Catherine II had to accept a settlement with Turkey less favorable than she might have expected if there had been no Pugachev
*--Frontier or imperial policy was now becoming a domestic political problem, ruling was becoming confused with governing, and vice-versa. Problems of domestic administration were interfering with imperialist ambitions

<>