5

War, Economy and Utopianism:

Russia after the Napoleonic Era
Janet M. Hartley

The Napoleonic Wars transformed the status of the Russian Empire within
Europe. At the beginning of the campaigns the perception of the other major
European powers was that Russia was not capable of inflicting a major defeat
on Napoleon without allied support. Alexander I was humiliated at the Battle
of Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, and almost suffered the indignity of being
captured. Following a further defeat at the Battle of Friedland in June 1807,
Alexander had to come to terms with Napoleon at Tilsit (7 July 1807) and
had to recognize the dominant position of the French Emperor in central
and eastern Europe. Relations between France and Russia deteriorated, par-
ticularly as a result of French influence over Poland and the implementation
of the Continental System, and led to the invasion of Russia in June 1812 by
a massive army of some 680,000 men. The presence of Napoleon’s troops in
the Russian Empire was brief compared with the experience of some other
European countries, but traumatic in terms of casualties suffered in major
battles (Smolensk on 16–18 August and Borodino on 7 September), and the
occupation of Moscow. The retreat started in mid-October and the Russian
campaign effectively ended on 14 December 1812, with the last troops of
the Grande Armée leaving Russian soil. But by now Russia had established its
military superiority and became the dominant partner of the coalition which
pushed Napoleon back to the borders of France. Alexander I entered Paris in
triumph on 30 March 1814 and subsequently dominated the peace negotia-
tions at Vienna.1 This new-found international status had, however, come at
an enormous cost. This chapter looks at how the Russian Empire, which had
many of the attributes normally considered to be ‘backward’ (political, social,
cultural, economic), dealt with strains of war which tested far more modern-
ized countries at the time.2

The costs of warfare

Russia suffered enormous human and material losses in the Napoleonic

Wars. First, the immediate economic consequences of the invasion were

84
A. Forrest et al. (eds.), War, Demobilization and Memory
© The Editor(s) 2016
 War, Economy and Utopianism 85

severe. The occupation and fire in Moscow led to the destruction of roughly
three-fifths of the city; almost all of Smolensk and smaller towns and
villages were ravaged in the western provinces on the invasion route. Towns,
villages and religious buildings had to be rebuilt after 1815. The state com-
pensated nobles, merchants and other inhabitants of Moscow with over
ten million roubles, and the Synod was given 3.5 million roubles to restore
churches in Moscow and elsewhere.3 Factories and workshops in the city
and the province had been destroyed, and trade only resumed slowly. In
Smolensk, nobles claimed that 710 houses had been destroyed, as well as
goods and crops, to the total value of over 2.5 million roubles.4 The invasion
left rotting bodies and carcasses on the land, which had to be cleared when
they thawed in the spring—in Smolensk province alone it was estimated
in December 1812 that there were 172,566 corpses and 128,739 animal
carcasses to be cleared.5 Peasants had their lands laid waste, their livestock
slaughtered, their grain seized by soldiers and their homes destroyed.
Peasants in the provinces subjected to invasion had to be exempted from
the poll tax, the main state tax on all peasants, sometimes for several years,
which also meant a further loss of income to the imperial treasury.
Second, the costs of sustained warfare over the whole Napoleonic period
were immense. It is difficult to be certain about Russian expenditure as fig-
ures are inaccurate and can be misleading. We know, however, that the pro-
portion of the budget spent on the armed forces was always high, but surged
during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1808, expenditure on the armed forces has
been estimated at 93 percent of net revenue.6 Expenditure covered pay,
equipment, armaments, uniforms, food, fodder and military administra-
tion. There was also, however, massive capital expenditure on fortresses and
on the garrisons which stretched in ‘lines’ across the frontiers of the country
in the south and the east. It has been estimated that about 26 million roubles
were spent on the building and repair of fortresses between 1803 and 1820.
An additional 25.7 million roubles were spent on construction between
1822 and 1825, that is, in peacetime after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
The main expenditure was always on the army but Russia also had to build
and then maintain ships and shipyards for its naval forces in the Baltic and
the Black Sea. Millions of roubles had already been spent on reconstruction
of the shipyards in Kronstadt and the Baltic ports in the 1780s and 1790s.7
Third, Russia sustained these extensive losses and expenditure without
modernizing her internal structures. The Russian state developed few of the
features of Napoleonic France, the most modern state at the time, or Britain,
and war naturally put significant strains on both those countries too. Russia
did not receive a French Revolutionary or Napoleonic-style constitution,
unlike so many other countries in Europe (although not, of course, Britain).
The Tsar retained powers unchecked by either an institutional or a legal
framework, even if in practice he had to be wary of alienating the noble elite.
The Russian legal system remained unmodernized; there was no ‘civil code’ in
86 Janet M. Hartley

Russia. The legal profession, and what we might call a ‘legal consciousness’,
only developed slowly. The first Russian professor of jurisprudence in Moscow
University, S. A. Desnitsky, had been trained at Glasgow University in the
1770s. The educational standards in the Russian Empire were low by western
and central European standards. By the early nineteenth century there were
six universities in Russia, but two of those—in Vilnius and Dorpat—were in
non-Russian lands and one—Khar’kov—was in Ukraine.8
The Russian social structure also remained unchanged during the Napoleonic
period. The institutionalization of serfdom in the mid-seventeenth century
was based on the assumption that nobles gave, mainly, military service to
the state in return for the exclusive privilege of owning serfs. The Russian
army was not strictly speaking a ‘serf army’, as only roughly half of the
peasantry were serfs, that is, peasants who lived on noble land, but it was
an army of conscripts and not of free citizens. Over 1.6 million men were
conscripted in the period 1796 to 1815.9 Service in the army was for life, or
25 years after 1793, which often in practice meant for life. This was itself a
reflection of Russia’s rigid social structure as ‘soldiers’ left their social estate
once they departed for the army and it was then almost impossible to
re-integrate them. They were no longer responsible for collective obligations
of their former social estate. Recruits left the village to the sound of funeral
laments, not only bewailing their fate but reflecting that as far as the village
was concerned they were ‘dead’, and would not return in any capacity. Their
wives often married again, sometimes with the connivance of the Orthodox
Church. A consequence of this was that soldiers were not ‘demobbed’ at the
end of campaigns but remained in the army, either in barracks or in garrisons
on the frontiers. The only exceptions to this were temporary militias levied
during the Napoleonic Wars. These men were supposed to be demobilized at
the end of the campaigns but the limited evidence that exists suggests that at
least some of them were transferred to regular regiments, and, in any event,
these were only a small number of soldiers.10
Moreover, Russia lacked a modern, entrepreneurial, or politically power-
ful business class, and the big factories in the Urals supplied goods for the
armed forces at prices determined largely by the state. Most of these factories
were run by nobles appointed by the state as a ‘privilege’. The labour force
was almost entirely serf labour, as the noble owners dispatched their serfs,
either as individuals or as whole villages, to work in their factories. In the
short term, warfare stimulated demand for iron, copper, weapons and cloth,
but by the 1820s the low productivity and lack of innovation in Russian
factories was beginning to set her apart from the productive processes
becoming common in western Europe. The primitive transport system, cou-
pled with the distances involved, furthermore inhibited the development of
modern internal commerce.11
Russia retained an Ancien Régime taxation system. The ‘privileged’ (the
nobles, wealthier merchants, members of the clergy) were not taxed and the
 War, Economy and Utopianism 87

burden of direct taxation fell on peasants and ordinary townspeople. As a

result, receipts were small and arrears were high. The poll tax, the state tax
on peasants and townspeople, was introduced by Tsar Peter the Great in 1718
specifically to fund the cost of the army, and was initially allocated based on
the sum required to cover that cost. The level of the poll tax failed to rise
over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and could not defray the
cost of warfare. Arrears on all taxation had reached over 20 million roubles
by 1793, and rose to over 80 million roubles in 1814.12 Indirect taxes were
levied by the state on necessities—in particular on salt and alcohol—but
the poverty of the majority of the inhabitants meant that this did not bring
in enough income to fund warfare (unlike, for example, Britain). Exports
increased as Britain in particular needed Russian raw material for her navy—
masts, hemp, tar, pitch—but the increase in tariffs did not fill the gap left by
arrears on internal taxation.
Banking was hopelessly undeveloped in Russia. The few banks which did
exist had been set up by the Russian rulers in the second half of the eight-
eenth century to encourage investment by nobles and attempt to reduce
their indebtedness (although in practice they only served to increase it). In
1810, in the peaceful interlude between the Treaty of Tilsit and the French
invasion of Russia, Mikhail Speransky, the chief minister, put forward a plan
to reform Russian banking, based on British and French models and the
latest economic thinking in Western Europe, which would have established
a state bank on the model of the Bank of England, run by shareholders,
and supported by new private banks. The plan was, however, considered
too radical to be implemented, and was then overtaken by events when
Napoleon invaded Russia.13
The gap between income and expenditure in Russia continued to
grow—something which also affected other states during the period of the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars like Prussia. In 1801 the deficit was
132 million roubles and this grew to over 143 million by 1809, and over
200 million in 1814.14 Lacking the means to generate income from taxation
or loans from its own banks, Russia had to resort to the two traditional ways
of funding warfare; first, loans and subsidies from other countries; second,
devaluation of the currency. Russia entered the Napoleonic Wars with debts
on loans taken by Catherine II to fund her wars with Turkey. However, the
Wars led to greater loans, from Amsterdam, and greater debt. The foreign
debt (called the ‘Dutch debt’) reached over 100 million guilders in 1816.
In the period after the war ended the situation only deteriorated. Russian
external and internal debt rose by 383 million roubles in the period from
1821 to 1824.15 The other short-term traditional solution to trying to cover
the cost of wars was the printing of paper money and the debasement of the
currency. By 1799, the paper rouble was only worth 69 copecks in silver.16
The strains of the Napoleonic Wars exacerbated the situation further. By 1810,
the paper rouble was only worth 29 copecks.17 In 1810, Speransky introduced
88 Janet M. Hartley

a number of reforms in an attempt to stabilize the rouble in the short term

but the outbreak of war again in 1812 led to the further printing of money.
The number of roubles in circulation increased from 580 million in 1810 to
836 million in 1817, and the value of the paper rouble continued to fall.18
The failure to increase income and reduce indebtedness had led Russia
by the end of the Napoleonic Wars to, in the words of one historian, ‘come
to the end of her resources’.19 Robert Walpole (the classical scholar and
traveller) gave his general assessment of the European situation in 1814 to
Secretary of State Viscount Castlereagh in which he noted that Russia had
a ‘deplorable state of finances’ and could not pay for her enormous army.20
Russia, put bluntly, was broke, yet she had to rebuild and compensate for
the losses of the invasion of 1812, and the disruption of trade and indus-
try. More fundamentally, she still had to pay for the support of the largest
standing army in the world—some 750,000 men—in order to maintain her
new-found position as a serious diplomatic player within Europe.

Military colonies

Russia had always stationed men in military or semi-military communities

on its border for defence, as indeed did Austria in the Balkans. That was how
Cossack communities originated on the southern borders of Russia. Cossack
regiments and garrison troops continued to guard the frontiers of Russia
in ‘lines’ of forts which stretched across the southern frontiers of Ukraine
and the north Caucasus, and then followed the southern borders of Siberia.
Some of these garrison troops were elderly and the army became almost a
form of ‘outdoor relief’ caring for elderly and sick soldiers who could not be
demobbed, and who had nowhere else to go.
In Alexander I’s reign, however, a far more complex attempt was made to
integrate the army into the social fabric of Russia through the establishment
of military colonies. Alexander was influenced by the ‘model villages’ which
his adviser Count Aleksei Arakcheev had set up on his own estates, where he
particularly admired: ‘(1) the order which prevails everywhere; (2) the neat-
ness; (3) the construction of roads and plantations; (4) a kind of symmetry
and elegance which pervades the place’.21
Military colonies were first set up in 1810 in western Russia, involving one
battalion and 4,000 state peasants (most of whom perished), but the outbreak
of war prevented their development. After 1815, they were conceived of on a far
greater scale. Alexander stated in the preamble to the decree which established
the colonies that they would serve ‘to ease [the peasants’] transition to the
military state and make [the soldiers’] service less burdensome’.22 The personal
commitment of Alexander to the colonies is not in doubt, and Arakcheev was
put in charge to ensure that his ideas would be fully implemented.
At one level, the military colonies were a simple solution to the costs of
sustaining and re-populating this enormous standing army. Colonies were
 War, Economy and Utopianism 89

to comprise roughly equal numbers of soldiers and officers on the one hand,
and peasants on the other hand. In peacetime, the soldiers—primarily of
peasant stock and young—would live with and work with the peasants on
the land and would feed themselves. In wartime, the soldiers would leave
to fight and the peasants would maintain all the land, and all the soldiers’
dependants, in their absence. Future recruits to the army would be drawn
from the children of peasants and soldiers in the colonies. At a stroke,
this would seem to solve the problems of having to maintain such a large
standing army: it would dispense with the need to provide supplies to feed
the army in peacetime; it would provide a constant supply of recruits as
ordinary soldiers, and even non-commissioned officers; it would make best
use of young, physically fit, soldiers, while continuing to fill garrisons with
elderly ones; in the process this would reduce the burden of conscription
and supporting the army on the rest of the population.23
The assumptions made by Alexander in the preamble to the decree raise
a number of questions around the colonies, in particular relating to how
they were set up and how they functioned in practice. However, it also
leads to broader questions about the intentions surrounding the initia-
tive, and about what Alexander and his ministers hoped to achieve in the
longer term. Had the colonies worked fully, they would not only have saved
money and supplied new recruits but would have transformed the relation-
ship between soldiers and peasants in peacetime, and could have led to a
fundamental change in the economic, social and legal relationship between
the new colonists and the state. In effect, the colonies would have created
new social groups and could have altered social and political relationships
within the Russian Empire.
The total number of colonists is a matter of dispute but was probably in
the region of three quarters of a million by the end of the reign, including
army personnel, peasants and minors.24 The colonies, however, comprised
more than soldiers and peasants in practice. The colonist had to be looked
after—physically and spiritually—and had to be educated and trained, not
only to ensure the economic success of the colonies, but also to train the
colonists and soldiers of the future. In the process, modern institutions
were to be established, in an attempt to end what Arakcheev and Alexander
regarded as the backward way of life in the Russian village.
No expense was spared to provide this support. Hospitals were estab-
lished, and midwives appointed: in July 1819 Arakcheev demonstrated his
personal commitment in correspondence over the appointment, and travel
arrangements, of one Natal’ia Kulakova as midwife to a colony in Novgorod
province (in the north-west of European Russia).25 By 1826, there were 29
churches in the Staraia Russa colony (in Novgorod province, situated about
100 kilometres south of the town of Novgorod) alone, staffed by 175 clergy.26
In 1827, it was estimated there were 157 schools in the colonies, employ-
ing almost 200 teachers and educating almost 17,000 pupils, using the
90 Janet M. Hartley

Lancastrian method of instruction, that is, the most modern method of the
time copied from Britain.27 Colonies were also supplied with specialists in
agricultural methods, including foreign agronomists and artisans; an English
agronomist was paid 4,000 roubles in 1824 to increase agricultural productiv-
ity.28 The very ‘best’ was imported to make the colonies work—from within
and outside the country. This could include anything from architects and
designers, teachers, pedigree livestock, foreign tools, warm clothing, bells
(for churches) and clocks (for timekeeping—something very unfamiliar to
peasants). All the buildings had to be constructed in brick and to a strict
design. A foreign visitor commented on the Novgorod colonies that:

…the double houses were very neat, and extended on one side of the road
for several versts; the spire of the church rose amongst them; attached
to each house was a small garden, and windmills with six sails were in
front; the soldiers were employed in the fields, mowing (in line), dressed
in forage-caps and jackets; also repairing the roads.29

Colonies required both the purchase of land and construction of houses

and roads. The role of colonies as landowners is an interesting one. Local
records show how in Novgorod province land was purchased from the
local nobility at seemingly a fixed price per acreage. The soil in Novgorod
province was not very fertile, and the establishment of colonies may have
been a godsend for the local nobility as they could sell unprofitable land
to an unlikely purchaser. In 1825, for example, a widow, Golenishcheva–
Kutuzova sold land comprising ploughed and unploughed land and woods
for a total 17,718 roubles 78 copecks to the colonies administration. Other
local nobles sold houses as well as land—another widow, Akermana, sold
her residence and outbuildings for 7,000 roubles.30 Local merchants and
state peasants in the region also sold and leased property, including houses,
shops, mills and gardens. In total, these purchases were very significant and
must have had a considerable impact on the local economy. The Second
Uhlan Regiment paid almost 81,000 roubles for land and property for their
colony in Ukraine.31
Not only, however, had land and buildings to be acquired and colonies
constructed, but people also had to be purchased. In the long term, the
colonies could be expected to reproduce themselves, but in the short term
peasant families had to be purchased as colonists. This is another feature of
the colonies which has received little scholarly attention. The costs were
high and, on the other side, the revenue acquired by the sale—from noble
serf-owners, or the state if they were state peasants—was also considerable.
The price varied according to the age and sex of the peasants. In 1823, they
were set by the state, ranging from 22 roubles for an infant (there was a risk
of course, as the child might die) to 300 roubles for a ten-year-old boy (who
could work) and 1,000 roubles for an 18-year-old boy, who could be a full
 War, Economy and Utopianism 91

colonist.32 In practice, prices could vary. In one document dated 1824,

14 children were bought at what seems an almost arbitrary price which dis-
guises the human cost of such purchases to the children, and their parents.
To give some examples: Evgeniia Bolgul’ianova, aged ten, cost as little as
150 roubles; at the other end of the scale Aleksei Sinapalov, aged 17, cost
930 roubles; Mikhail Gur’ev, aged 11, cost 390 roubles; his sister, Praskov’ia,
aged 14, cost 330 roubles; the brothers Spiridov, Efim aged nine and Zakhar
aged 13, cost 258 and 430 roubles respectively.33 This was at a time when
‘substitutes’ were regularly purchased as recruits for the army, either indi-
vidually or collectively by peasants, or by noble landowners on behalf of
their peasants, and when peasants were bought and sold as ‘property’.34
Nevertheless, these transactions not only demonstrate the financial com-
mitment of the government to the colonies but are also significant for an
examination of the more ‘utopian’ aims of the colonies.
The total cost of the colonies to Russia is impossible to calculate accu-
rately but it was clearly very considerable. A recent study by a Russian his-
torian estimates that the cost per year between 1820 and 1829 varied from
2.5 million to over four million roubles.35 In addition, Arakcheev built up
the capital of the colonies, to an estimated 30 million roubles by 1831.
How could such expenditure possibly be justified, given the declared aim
of the colonies to reduce the burden on the population? The burden on
recruitment was not fully tested in the long term as the colonies underwent
so much change in the 1830s and were never expanded to the extent that
they could replace the normal recruitment procedures. Indeed, Nicholas I
was obliged in the 1830s to consider other ways in which the levy could be
made less burdensome. The military component of the colonies was small
in reality. It was estimated that of the three-quarters of a million inhabit-
ants of the colonies, only some 160,000 were officers and men. This was at a
time when the standing Russian army numbered some 750,000 men.36 So, at
best, the colonies were feeding and supporting less than a quarter of the
armed forces. The rest were quartered on peasant households, lodged in bar-
racks (although there were relatively few of these in Russia compared with
other European countries) or private houses in towns, or employed in the
garrisons. If we also take into account that Russia had a navy of not incon-
siderable size, then the military colonies only catered for a relatively small
part of the total armed forces, and at considerable expense.
That expense could have been justified if the colonies had fulfilled their
economic aims. The evidence for this is not clear cut, and, in any event, the
colonies did not last long enough in the form envisaged by Alexander and
Arakcheev to have their credentials tested to the full. All the indications
are, however, that on economic grounds the colonies failed to justify the
expenditure in establishing them. The colonies were supposed to introduce
the most modern agricultural methods. New roads should have improved
communications which should have stimulated trade. The ‘discipline’ of
92 Janet M. Hartley

the colonies should have improved productivity. The presence of young

and physically fit soldiers should have helped agricultural work. At the same
time, their presence should have encouraged marriage with local peasant
girls and procreation, which would have increased the population of the
colonies. We know that new crops were introduced into Novgorod province,
a region where productivity was traditionally low. These new crops included
potatoes in 1818. Official reports from the colonies listed the ‘successes’ of
agriculture by yields of crops and by the development of rural industries,
like fishing. Some peasants clearly thrived: one colonist became so wealthy
that he had bought land from a noble and owned 2,000 Spanish sheep.37
Other evidence, however, suggests that the military colonies were not an
economic success, or at least not to the extent of justifying this vast outlay of
resources. The poor quality of land in Novgorod meant that peasants needed
large allocations of land to prosper. In practice, the colonies failed to provide
enough land and so most peasant–colonists remained in poverty. Figures
for yields are unreliable; in Novgorod colonies they rose but, according to a
recent Russian historian, did not reach the levels needed to sustain the peas-
ants.38 Harvests were poor throughout this period in the Ukrainian colonies.
Rigid adherence to new crops and arbitrary allocation of livestock to peas-
ants irrespective of local conditions often distorted the traditional pattern of
agriculture with poor results. Initiatives to develop new crops, the building of
mills and local industry in colonies could disrupt local trade. Colonists were
further diverted by the obligation on all colonists—including peasants—to
perform drill and be subjected to inspections and other, hated, military obli-
gations, as well as being forced to carry out construction work. Colonel I.
Dibich (Diebitsch), in Russian service, commented in 1826 that: ‘…the
soldier–farmers are scarcely able to feed their own families … agriculture has
been completely neglected and everything has been done for appearance’s
sake instead of for genuine effect’.39 In addition, of course, peasants were
supposed to feed extra mouths—the soldier and their officers living in the
colonies. This simply proved to be impossible, and was not compensated for
by exemption from the state poll tax for colonists. The burden was especially
onerous if the peasant had to support not only a soldier but also a cavalry
horse. The British traveller, Robert Lyall, estimated that it cost between 45
and 50 roubles a year to support a soldier and between 180 and 200 roubles
a year to maintain a cavalry horse.40 This made the colonies economically
unsustainable.
The longer-term sustainability of the colonies could only be assured by
maintaining their population, and, indeed, growing so that the pool of
recruits could be maintained and increased. Marriages were certainly encour-
aged between soldiers and peasant girls, and there were contemporary
rumours that these were forced by the authorities to stimulate population
growth. There were tales of peasant girls being chosen by ‘lot’, and of soldiers
being lined up by their officers and allocated brides on the spot.41 These
 War, Economy and Utopianism 93

stories cannot be verified but there is evidence that many marriages did take
place, doubtless stimulated by the reward of 25 roubles per wedding, a not
inconsiderable sum at the time. In 1824, as many as 3,813 marriages took
place in the one colony of Staraia Russa. At the same time, the colony sensi-
bly employed a wet nurse!42 It is not clear whether this could be sustained;
the reality was that such a burst of activity mopped up the single girls in a
village. The following year only 423 marriages took place.
The colonies failed as economic units and as a pool for future recruits. Put
this way, the enormous investment of money and time by the government
and Alexander’s personal commitment to the scheme simply seem bizarre.
It can in fact only be understood not in these, practical, terms but as a
wider, utopian, vision for Russian state and society. Tsar Alexander saw the
military colonies as a new way of keeping soldiers in the army after the wars
had ended and of not only improving the economic life of the peasants but
creating a new type of peasant. He wanted all the colonies to be completely
ordered in their layout in comparison with the scattered, disorganized,
Russian village. As the British traveller, Sir Robert Ker Porter observed, the
Tsar saw the scheme as: ‘…forwarding the civilization of the peasantry—by
introducing a habit of order and cleanliness, as well as a more extensive
knowledge of the ordinary acquirements of reading and writing’.43 It would
also, according to Ker Porter, stop peasants from ‘passing a great deal of their
lives in drunkenness and idleness’. Such thinking was behind the setting
up of schools and other welfare institutions in the colonies. The aim was to
eliminate not only the poverty, but also the superstition and ignorance of
the Russian village.
The colonies aimed, however, to do more than this; not just to create a
clean, tidy and literate peasant but a new type of citizen, and ‘new man’,
legally as well as morally. Alexander hinted that he wanted a new type of
property ownership in the colonies—not serfs, not state peasants, but a new
legal category of ‘colonists’. The colonies had not only their own new layout
and economic priorities set out for them, but also their own educational
system, and their own laws, which were outside and distinct from the laws
and institutions of the land. Furthermore, had the colonies functioned in
the way envisaged they would have created a new cadre of soldiers whose
only loyalty would have been to the person of the Tsar, and who would have
been completely detached from the rest of Russian society.
The ambitions of Alexander are so potentially far reaching that they
can be seen as ‘utopian’. That was certainly not lost on contemporaries,
in Russia or abroad. Russian soldiers and Russian officers hated having to
be located in colonies and saw themselves reduced to little more than the
peasantry themselves. Moreover, officers were also members of the Russian
nobility and nobles were more fearful of the creation of a new social group
who were neither serfs nor state peasants, and who, Alexander had hinted,
could ‘own’ the land of the colonies. Any change in the ownership of land
94 Janet M. Hartley

could threaten the status of nobles as the only group in society entitled to
own serfs, a right which had been originally granted in the mid-seventeenth
century in return for service, mainly military, to the state. The colonies were
a ‘state within a state’ and that was inevitably threatening to the existing
social order.
Furthermore, the creation of a potential new military force, loyal only to
the Tsar, was a threat to the political position of nobles. There were prec-
edents for this which rightly worried nobles. Tsar Peter I had put down a
revolt at the beginning of his reign employing a separate and special mili-
tary force—the so-called strel’tsy, usually translated as ‘musketeers’—whose
loyalty was supposed to be to the Tsar alone rather than to the nobles as a
social group. As one nobleman said at the time, the colonists ‘are the new
strel’tsy who, in time, will lead Russia to a revolution’.44 This threat was also
not lost on foreign commentators. Robert Lyall remarked in his account
that the:

…gigantic system contains in its bosom the seeds which will spring
up, and prove its own … under a warlike sovereign it may operate the
subversion of all the established dynasties of Europe; under a weak one,
the partitions of Russia may be looked upon as likely to result from the
explosion of its latent power.45

More explicit was a long memorandum on the colonies sent in 1826 by the
British politician and diplomat Edward Disbrowe, Minister Plenipotentiary
in Russia, to George Canning, the Foreign Secretary, in which his warning
is clear:

…a mass of Military force would be formed in time beyond all calcula-

tion, and most dangerous to its neighbours … In its present shape, the
plan offers … the anomaly of an half educated military population
dependent on the Crown, placed in the Centre of an half savage peas-
antry slaves to a Nobility, who themselves tremble at the Nod of The
Despot. There will thus be a complete ‘Imperium in Imperio’, which in
my humble opinion must soon escape from the control of its chief, an
event the accomplishment of which the present troubles in this Country
may hasten but which, in the ordinary course of things, must change the
whole face of the Empire.46

In the event the experiment with the colonies failed. They were hated by
the soldiers, the officers and the peasants. As Viscount Strangford, British
ambassador in Russia, reported to Canning in 1826: ‘…the soldier (and
more particularly the officer) complains of being reduced to the level of the
peasant, whilst the peasant complains of his privacy being disturbed; his
little property invaded, and himself exposed to most of the inconveniences
 War, Economy and Utopianism 95

of the military service’.47 Robert Lyall characterized the peasant resentment

in more human terms: within a peasant hut, he wrote, ‘Every thing bore
an aspect of military regularity: the very water pail has its assigned place,
and should it happen to be found in any other, by the inspecting subaltern
officer, on his morning visit, a severe reprimand, if not a stroke of the cane
is sure to follow’.48 Peasants proved ungrateful for the introduction of clean-
liness and civilization into their villages, including even the importation
of English-styled latrines! Lyall summed up the colonies as ‘held in utter
abhorrence by the peasantry; … detested by the regular army … highly dis-
approved of by all classes of the nobility’.49
Resentment against the brutal discipline and lack of sensitivity to local
customs (not least the requirement that peasants had to shave off their
beards) led to a series of revolts in the colonies in 1818 and 1819. These
were put down with great savagery in which all the humanitarian ideals
of the colonies were forgotten. A revolt in Chuguev, in the south, involved
over 27,000 people. Over 1,000 colonists and 899 soldiers were arrested and
many subjected to severe punishments including running the gauntlet.50 In
1831, in the early years of the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, a great revolt took
place in Novgorod province which was suppressed so brutally that all the
failings of the colonies were exposed. Some 200 protestors died and over
3,600 were tried and punished. Sixty men were sentenced to receive some
4,000 blows as they passed eight times through the ranks of 500 men;
50 died as a result.51 One contemporary described the scenes as: ‘…hell …
clamour, weeping, cries, moans–flowed like a wave, and tore not only at the
heart and the soul but, it seemed, at the very stones lying at the place of
punishment’.52

Conclusion

The colonies failed in their practical aims: they could not sustain a stand-
ing army; they could not lessen the burden of the recruitment levy on the
Russian population. Nor were Alexander’s more utopian aspirations realized.
The history of the colonies ended in bloodshed and savage reprisals for
revolts. Where did that leave Russia? On the financial side, the experiment
had failed to find a solution to the unsustainable cost of maintaining her
army. Nicholas toyed with ideas about changing the recruitment levy but
without success.53 More fundamentally, this experiment, proposed by the
Tsar, within, at least in his view, the social and political order, had failed. It
demonstrated that there were no easy solutions to reforming and modern-
izing society or the economy without more fundamental change to the
Russian political and social order.
Admittedly, in the short term there was no pressure on Russia to change
her political or social system. She had been victorious in the Napoleonic
Wars: traditional, unmodernized Russia had beaten the most modern nation
96 Janet M. Hartley

in Continental Europe; peasant armies had triumphed over ‘free’ men.

Russia—like the other victor in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain—was under
no pressure to introduce modern, French-style, constitutions, let alone to
change the social or political order. But the financial weakness of Russia
had been fully exposed and the country was almost bankrupted by the
Napoleonic Wars. The failure to resolve this within the political and social
system either by the reforms introduced by Mikhail Speransky or by the
newly established military colonies simply exposed this weakness further.
The tsars and the government were fully aware of Russia’s vulnerability but
unable to address the issue without risking undermining the social system,
and ultimately their own authority. While Russia was at peace, or while
European conflicts could be localized, then the Ancien Régime could sur-
vive. However, tested again by war in the Crimea, the failure to transform
from within was cruelly illustrated. Defeat in the Crimean War led to fun-
damental change to the social order, and the abolition of serfdom. It took
defeat, or at least military failure, in further wars in the twentieth century
to force political change and ultimately to result in the end of the tsarist
system, which had been so successful on the field of battle in the early
nineteenth century.

Notes
1. The literature on Russia during the Napoleonic Wars is too extensive to be listed
in full. The excellent recent study by Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon:
The Battle for Europe, 1807–1814 (London, 2009) includes an extensive biblio-
graphy. The best recent biography of Alexander I is Marie-Pierre Rey, Alexander I:
The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon (Dekalb, IL, 2012), which is a translation of
Alexander Ier (Paris, 2009). The proceedings of a recent, 2014, conference on
Russia and the Napoleonic Wars which brought together scholars from North
America, Western and Eastern Europe and Russia have now been published in a
volume entitled Russia and the Napoleonic Wars (Basingstoke, 2015), ed. by Janet
M. Hartley, Paul Keenan and Dominic Lieven.
2. This chapter draws heavily on my Russia 1762–1825: Military Power, the State
and the People (Westport, CT, 2008), and in particular on Chapter 10 on the
military colonies, 190–208. The methods Russia deployed to deal with the
human and material costs of war, and the consequences of this for state and
society, are the themes of the book. The conclusion is that Russia did so not
by modernizing but by strengthening its traditional structures: of the state,
of the economy and of society. Service in the army became the raison d’e ̑tre of
the nobility with serfdom and tax exemptions regarded as exclusive symbols
of their privilege and reward for service. At the same time, the mechanism of
conscription of peasants reinforced the traditional authority of the peasant
commune, which selected the recruits, and preserved the collective responsi-
bility of the commune. In addition, the culling of the least useful members of
the peasant community, and the transfer of income from rich to poor peas-
ants through the purchase of substitutes, helped to preserve the traditional
economy and the social relationships of the village. The expansion of the
 War, Economy and Utopianism 97

arms industry occurred within pre-modern economic and social relationships.

Finally the image of the Tsar as the military victor asserted traditional values;
soldiers fought to assert the superiority of Orthodox Christianity but also for
the Tsar, and, by implication, for the existing social and political order which
underpinned Tsardom.
3. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (hereafter PSZ), vol. 32, no. 25, 275, 463,
26 November 1812.
4. I. P. Shcherov, Zapadnoi region Rossii i Dekabrizm (Smolensk, 2003), 66–71.
5. Otechestvennaia voina v khudozhestvennykh proizvodeniiakh, zapiskakh, pismakh i
vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, compiled by A. V. Mezier (St Petersburg, 1912),
171. See also Janet M. Hartley, ‘Russia in 1812: Part 1: The French Presence in
the Gubernii of Smolensk and Mogilev’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 38
(1990): 178–198.
6. Frederick W. Kagan, The Military Reforms of Nicholas I: The Origins of the Modern
Russian Army (London, 1999), 12.
7. L. G. Beskrovnyi, The Russian Army and Fleet in the Nineteenth Century (Gulf Breeze,
FL, 1996), 256–257.
8. For a general survey of educational developments in the Russian Empire in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century see Janet M. Hartley, A Social History
of the Russian Empire 1650–1825 (London, 1999), 125–145; the most thorough
account of the establishment of universities can be found in James T. Flynn, The
University Reforms of Alexander I 1802–1835 (Washington, DC, 1988).
9. L. G. Beskrovnyi, Russkaia armiia i flot v XVIII v (ocherki) (Moscow, 1958), 294–297.
10. For more details on conscription and its consequences see Hartley, Russia 1762–
1825, 29–46, and Janet M. Hartley, ‘The Russian Recruit’, in Reflections on Russia
in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joachim Klein, et al. (Cologne, 2001), 32–42. On
militias see Janet M. Hartley, ‘Patriotism in the Provinces in 1812: Volunteers and
Donations’, in Russia and the Napoleonic Wars, 148–162.
11. For more details on the operation of the Russian economy and its limitation
in supporting the needs of the army and navy see Hartley, Russia 1762–1825,
88–99.
12. K. V. Sivkov, ‘Finansy Rossii posle voin s Napoleonon’, in Otechestvennaia
voina i russkoe obshchestvo, ed. A. K. Dzhivelegov (Moscow, 1912), vol. 7,
124–137, 131.
13. Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia 1772–1839 (The Hague,
1957), 92, 97–98.
14. Ministerstvo finansov 1802–1902 gg. (official Ministry of Finance publication)
(St Petersburg, 1902), vol. 1, 170–171; and Sivkov, ‘Finansy Rossii’, 132–133.
15. V. G. Sirotkin, ‘Finansovo-ekonomicheskoe posledstvia Napoleonovskikh voin i
Rossiia v 1814–1824 gody’, Istoriia SSSR 4 (1974): 46–56, 56.
16. Beskrovnyi, Russkaia armiia, 379.
17. L. G. Beskrovnyi, Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda (Moscow, 1962), 250.
18. Kagan, Military Reforms, 15.
19. Quoted in Ibid., 13.
20. The National Archives, London, Foreign Office, FO 65/94, Walpole to Castlereagh,
St Petersburg, 29 April 1814.
21. Richard Pipes, ‘The Military Colonies, 1810–1831’, Journal of Modern History 22
(1950): 205–219, 211.
22. Quoted in John L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874
(Oxford, 1985), 284.
98 Janet M. Hartley

23. The section on military colonies is drawn largely from Hartley, Russia 1762–1825,
Chapter 10, 190–208, which uses archival material in Russia. A good introduction
in English is Pipes, ‘Military Colonies’, 205–219.
24. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, 286.
25. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskiii arkhiv, Moscow (hereafter
RGVIA), fond (hereafter f.) 405, opis’ (hereafter op.) 3, delo (hereafter d.) 101,
folios (hereafter fos) 1–2v, Military colonies, on the hiring of a midwife for the
Prince of Prussia’s Regiment, 1819.
26. Novgorodskii sbornik (Novgorod, 1865), Part III, 139–140.
27. K. M. Iachmenikhin, Voennye poseleniia v Rossii: Istoriia sotsial’no-ekonomicheskogo
eksperimenta (Ufa, 1994), 56.
28. RGVIA, f. 405, op. 3, d. 348, Military colonies, payment of 4,000 roubles to an
English agronomist.
29. James E. Alexander, Travels to the Seat of War in the East, through Russia and the
Crimea in 1829 (London, 1830), vol. 1, 142.
30. RGVIA, f. 405, op. 3, d. 364, fos 30, 60–60v, Military colonies, on the purchasing
and leasing of land, 1824–1825.
31. Ibid., fos 116, 119, 179v.
32. PSZ, vol. 38, no. 29,312, 768–770, 13 February 1823.
33. RGVIA, f. 405, op. 3, d. 381, fos 1, 9–9v, 15–17, Military colonies, on moving
women and children to the colonies.
34. For more details on the purchase of substitutes for the army see Hartley, Russia
1762–1825, 33–34, 79–81. See also Rodney D. Bohac, ‘The Mir and the Military
Draft’, Slavic Review 47 (1988): 652–666.
35. K. M. Iachmenikhin, ‘Ekonomicheskii potentsial voennykh poselenii v Rossii’,
Voprosy istorii 2 (1997): 34–48.
36. Beskrovnyi, The Russian Army, 2.
37. L. P. Bogdanov, Voennye poseleniia v Rossii (Moscow, 1992), 53.
38. Iachmenikhin, ‘Ekonomicheskii potentsial’, 39–43.
39. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, 289–290.
40. Robert Lyall, An Account of the Organisation etc of the Military Colonies in Russia
(London, 1824), 38.
41. A. N. Petrov, ‘Ustroistvo i upravlenie voennykh poselenii v Rossii’, in Materialy k
noveishei otechestvennoi istorii: Graf Arakcheev i voennye poseleniia, ed. M. I. Semevskii
(St Petersburg, 1871), 85–207, 159; and S. I. Maevskii, ‘Moi vek ili istoriia generala
Maevskogo’, Russkaia starina 10 (1873): 427–464, 435.
42. Novgorodskii sbornik (Novgorod, 1865), Part IV, 233–234.
43. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. hist. c.409, fo. 25v, Notes to Sir Robert Ker
Porter on the military colonies.
44. Quoted in Pipes, ‘The Military Colonies’, 217.
45. Lyall, An Account, 39, 40.
46. Alexander Bitis and Janet M. Hartley, ‘The Russian Military Colonies in 1826’, The
Slavonic and East European Review 79 (2000): 323–330, 329.
47. The National Archives, London, Foreign Office, FO 65/157, Strangford to
Canning, 23 January/4 February 1826, quoted in Bitis and Hartley, ‘The Russian
Military Colonies’, 328.
48. Lyall, An Account, 43.
49. Ibid., 40–41.
50. V. A. Fedorov, ‘Bor’ba krest’ian Rossii protiv voennykh poselenii, 1810–1818’,
Voprosy istorii 11 (1952): 112–124, 121.
 War, Economy and Utopianism 99

51. P. Pavlov, ‘Vospominaniia ochevidtsa o bunte voennykh poselian v 1831’, Istoricheskii

vestnik 3 (1894): 738–787, 786.
52. I. Radzikovskii, ‘Epizod iz bunta voennykh poselian v 1831 godu’, Istoricheskii
vestnik 11 (1888): 434–447, 447.
53. Alexander Bitis, ‘Reserves under Serfdom? Nicholas I’s Attempt to Solve the
Russian Army’s Manpower Crisis under Serfdom’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte
Osteuropas 51 (2003): 185–196.