“To Each Their Grievance Is Bitter and Unbearable”: Petitions, Autocracy, and the Rule of Law in Eighteenth-Century Russia
Keywords:
the eighteenth century, petitions, emphasizing, abasement, administrative, inefficienciesAbstract
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Russian rulers released dozens of decrees about petitions. First, the decrees regulated the format of petitions, emphasizing their formulaic nature and moving them away from the personal appeals with supplication and abasement that were present in earlier centuries. These decrees recognized that petitions were essential to the administrative functioning of the imperial Russian state but saw them as akin to forms or applications. Second, the decrees stated firmly that petitioners should not approach the ruler directly. In part, these decrees reflect the rulers’ irritation at being endlessly bothered by personal requests, but Russia’s rulers also gave a more serious justification for the ban on personal appeals: they had established the rule of law, which meant that their subjects did not need to bother them personally and instead should clearly know other authorities—courts, governors—to address for aid. While efforts to change the format of petitions largely succeeded, efforts to curtail petitions directly to the ruler largely failed. That failure likely reflects several factors: inefficiencies in the judicial or administrative system, contradictory laws that still made space for petitions because they were useful, and because they held the promise of getting help quickly.
References
1
Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii: Pervoe sobranie, 45 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1830) (hereafter PSZ) vol. 5, no. 3261 (December 22, 1718). On its link to founding the colleges, see Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 11, and James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 162–63.
2
On the chancelleries and their limits, see Peter Bowman Brown, “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy: The Evolution of the Chancellery System from Ivan III to Peter the Great, 1478–1717” (PhD Thesis, The University of Chicago, 1978); Endre Sashalmi, “‘God Is High up, the Tsar Is Far Away’. The Nature of Polity and Political Culture in Seventeenth-Century Russia. A Comparative View,” in Empowering Interactions: Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe 1300–1900, eds. Wim Blockmans, André Holenstein, and Jon Mathieu (Routledge, 2009), 142; and on their eventual replacement by the colleges, see E. V. Anisimov, Gosudarstvennye preobrazovaniia i samoderzhavie Petra velikogo (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1997), Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 105–11; L. F. Pisar’kova, Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie Rossii s kontsa XVII do kontsa XVIII veka: Evoliutsiia biurokraticheskoi sistemy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), 36–9, 145–9.
3
William E. Pomeranz, Law and the Russian State: Russia’s Legal Evolution from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 16.
4
For more discussion of the decree in the context of both founding the colleges and limiting personal appeals, see Lindsey Hughes, Peter the Great: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 120 and Nancy S. Kollmann, “Change and Continuity in the Law under Peter I,” in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy: Papers from the VII International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Roger P. Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli (Berlin: LIT Verlag Münster, 2007), 388.
5
See, for example, Peter Blickle, ed., Resistance, Representation and Community, The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th to 18th Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), esp. 333–6; Beat Kümin and Andreas Würgler, “Petitions, Gravamina and the Early Modern State: Local Influence on Central Legislation in England and Germany (Hesse),” Parliaments, Estates & Representation 17, no. 1 (1997): 39–60; Andreas Würgler, “Voices From Among the ‘Silent Masses’: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe,” International Review of Social History 46, no. S9 (2001): 11–34; Cecilia Nubola, “Supplications between Politics and Justice: The Northern and Central Italian States in the Early Modern Age,” International Review of Social History 46, no. S9 (2001): 35–56; Derek Beales, “Joseph II, Petitions and the Public Sphere,” in Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. H. M. Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge: University Press, 2007), 249–68; Brodie Waddell, “The Popular Politics of Local Petitioning in Early Modern England,” The Journal of British Studies 63, no. 3 (2024): 568–87.
6
Samuel Collins, The Present State of Russia: In a Letter to a Friend at London (London, 1671), 44. On the format and rhetorical strategies of pre-Petrine petitions, see Horace W. Dewey and Ann Marie Kleimola, “The Petition (čelobitnaja) as an Old Russian Literary Genre,” The Slavic and East European Journal 14 (1970): 284–301; S. S. Volkov, Leksika russkikh chelobitnykh semnadtsatogo veka: formuliar, traditsionnye etiketnye i stilevye sredstva (Leningrad: Izd-vo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1974).
7
On differences between petition (proshenie or chelobitnaia), complaint (zhaloba), and denunciation (donos), see Elena Bogdanova, Complaints to the Authorities in Russia. A Trap Between Tradition and Legal Modernization (London: Taylor & Francis, 2023), 22–8 and S. V. Rusanova, “Naimenovaniia prositel’nykh dokumentov v zakonodatel’nykh aktakh i regionaln’nykh dokumentakh XVIII veka,” Vestnik VolGU, Series 2, 18, no. 2 (2019): 16–26. I use “petition” as an overarching term for letters written to the ruler or the ruler’s administrators seeking mercy or justice.
8
A small sample of works that draw on petitions to understand imperial society include: Andrew Verner, “Discursive Strategies in the 1905 Revolution: Peasant Petitions from Vladimir Province,” The Russian Review 51 (1995): 65–90; Emily E. Pyle, “Peasant Strategies for Obtaining State Aid: A Study of Petitions During World War I,” Russian History 24 (1997): 41–64; Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom : Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Barbara Alpern Engel, “In the Name of the Tsar: Competing Legalities and Marital Conflict in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 77 (2005): 70–96; E. Iu. Moriakov, “Regional’naia identichnost’ krepostnykh v prosheniiakh imperatoru Pavlu Pervomu,” Quaestio Rossica 8 (2020): 1292–1306; Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, “Becoming Armenian: Religious Conversions in the Late Imperial South Caucasus,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63 (2021): 242–72; Alberto Masoero, “The Siberian Land Survey and the Politics of Spatial Approximation,” The Journal of Modern History 93 (2021): 283–323.
9
First quotation from Valerie A. Kivelson, “Muscovite ‘Citizenship’: Rights without Freedom,” The Journal of Modern History 74 (2002): 474; second quotation from Roger Bartlett, “Serfdom and State Power in Imperial Russia,” European History Quarterly 33 (2003): 45. Additional descriptions of the role of petitions as an exchange between governing and governed include Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Brown, “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy,” 154 and Robert D. Givens, “Supplication and Reform in the Instructions of the Nobility,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 11, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 483–502. On the post and other methods of creating “channels of communication” between petitioners and the monarch, see E. Iu. Moriakov, “Novye kanaly kommunikatsii prositelei i monarkha v Rossii na rubezhe XVIII–XIX vekov,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia (2022): 55–71. On petitions as part of a system that was “both formal and bureaucratized,” see Eugene Miakinkov, “‘Your Excellency Needs Only to Wish It’: Awards and Promotion Culture in the Army of Catherine II,” The Russian Review 75 (2016): 464.
10
Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Ritual and Social Drama at the Muscovite Court,” Slavic Review 45, no. 3 (1986): 498–9, 501; also Marshall Poe, A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2000).
11
See Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1999), 59–60; Alison K. Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), 56.
12
Valerie Kivelson, “Merciful Father, Impersonal State: Russian Autocracy in Comparative Perspective,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (July 1997): 652.
13
Bogdanova, Complaints to the Authorities in Russia, 8.
14
PSZ vol. 1, Ulozhenie.
15
PSZ vol. 2, no. 1185 (April 24, 1686).
16
PSZ vol. 6, no. 3534 (February 28, 1720).
17
PSZ vol. 3, no. 1673 (January 23, 1699); no. 1703 (October 12, 1699); no. 4901 (June 3, 1726); vol. 11, no. 8502 (January 18, 1742); vol. 16, no. 12016 (January 16, 1764); vol. 23, no. 17226 (June 23, 1794).
18
PSZ vol. 4, no. 1901 (March 10, 1702), followed by more specifics on recording petitions in no. 1904 (March 19, 1702). On the transition, see Simon Franklin, The Russian Graphosphere, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 33.
19
PSZ vol. 7, no. 4329 (October 20, 1723); vol. 25, no. 18656 (September 6, 1798).
20
PSZ vol. 16, no. 12016 (January 16, 1764). The same right was extended to economic peasants later that year in no. 12078 (March 9, 1764) and reaffirmed in vol. 22, no. 16475 (December 18, 1786).
