Vasili O. Kliuchevsky - A Course in Russian History: The Time of Catherine the Great

First published 1997 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kliuchevskii, V. O. (Vasili Osipovich), 18411911.

[Kurs russkoi istorii. Chast 45. English]

A course in Russian historythe time of Catherine the Great / by

Vasily O. Kliuchevsky: translated and edited by Marshall S. Shatz.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56324-526-4 (alk. paper).

ISBN 1-56324-527-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. RussiaHistoryCatherine II, 17621796.

I. Shatz, Marshall. II.Title.

DK170.K4513 1997

947.06dc21 97-8080

CIP

ISBN: 978-1-563-24527-5 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-563-24526-8 (hbk)

T his volume is a translation of Lectures 7381 of Kliuchevskys Course in Russian History, comprising the last two lectures of Part 4 and the first seven lectures of Part 5. The Russian text used for this translation is Kurs russkoi istorii, edited by V. A. Aleksandrov and A.A. Zimin, in the fourth and fifth volumes of V.O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v vosmi tomakh (Moscow: Gos. Izdat. Politicheskoi Literatury/Izdat. Sotsialno-ekonomicheskoi Literatury, 195659).

The illustrations are from Volume 12 of Sochineniia Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, edited by A.N. Pypin (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1907).

The transliteration system employed is a simplified version of the Library of Congress system, but with some additional changes to facilitate pronunciation.

Dates are given according to the Julian calendar in use in Russia both in Catherines and in Kliuchevskys time. It was eleven days behind the Western calendar in the eighteenth century and twelve days behind in the nineteenth.

I have taken some minor liberties with the text, adding chapter titles, dividing excessively long paragraphs, and rendering names according to American usage (first name and last name), with patronymics given in the Glossary of Names. All footnotes are those of the translator.

The preparation of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency. I am grateful to the Endowment for its generous support. I also wish to thank Professors Marc Raeff and John Alexander, who kindly read the Introduction and shared with me their expert knowledge of the reign of Catherine the Great.

A mong the outstanding works of literature generated by the burgeoning culture of imperial Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a historical work, Vasily Kliuchevskys A Course in Russian History. It may seem odd to speak of a work of historyand in five volumes, no lessin the same breath as the great novels, stories, and plays that arose alongside it, but it is not inappropriate. In its cultural significance for Russia and even in its artistic qualities, Kliuchevskys Course is worthy of comparison with its fictional contemporaries. It constitutes a grand synthesis of ten centuries of Russian history, from the rise of the Kievan state in the ninth century to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. More than any other single work, for much of the twentieth century Kliuchevskys Course has shaped the conception of Russias history in the minds of educated Russians and even, to a considerable degree, of non-Russians.

From its inception, the impact of the Course grew in ever widening circles, like a stone cast into a pond. At first its influence was confined to the students at Moscow University, where Kliuchevsky taught for over thirty years. Even there, it reached well beyond Kliuchevskys own lecture hall (which was the largest at the university). Given the scarcity of printed textbooks, professors lectures were frequently transcribed by students and disseminated in lithographed form. Sometimes the lithographed versions were authorized and corrected by the professor, sometimes they were unauthorized. Numerous lithographed editions of Kliuchevskys lectures, some approved by him and some illicit, appeared over the years and circulated widely. The Course reached a much broader public when Kliuchevsky began to publish it, to great acclaim, in book form in 1904. Four parts, or volumes, had appeared by the time of his death in 1911.1 In an article appropriately entitled Kliuchevskys Russia, the historian of religion George Fedotov, who was educated before the Russian Revolution, wrote that whenever any of us think of historical Russia, what comes to mind is the Russia Kliuchevsky visualized.2

Kliuchevskys impact on Russian historical scholarship continued unabated even after his death. As the occupant of the chair in Russian history at Moscow University, he contributed to the formation of much of the next generation of Russian historians. Some of them helped build the historical profession in the Soviet Union after 1917, while others, in emigration, became influential interpreters of Russia to the West. Meanwhile, the Course was taking on a life of its own. Unlike many other products of prerevolutionary Russian culture and scholarship, which were passed over in silence or, at best, led a shadowy existence in the Soviet years, Kliuchevskys Course enjoyed virtually official recognition, despite its suspect status as an artifact of non-Marxist bourgeois historiography. It was first reprinted in 1921 and then a second time, astonishingly, in 1937, at the height of the Stalinist terror. In the late 1950s it was reprinted yet again, this time in a meticulously edited and annotated eight-volume collection of Kliuchevskys works. This edition of the