Social and economic thought in eighteenth-century Russia

The eighteenth century for Russia was a period perhaps more than any other when the country and its best minds were open to the intellectual currents of contemporary Europe. Emperor Peter I, the Great (ruled 1696–1725), in Aleksandr Pushkin's famous phrase, ‘cut a window through to Europe’. Russia's subsequent emergence as a great power and her opening to European science and culture coincided with the Enlightenment and the extraordinary supranational fluidity of its ideas and thought. During the century that followed Peter's reign, European ideas found increasing access and were taken up by the educated elites. French thought and literature were prominent – Voltaire had a following already in the 1730s – but German ideas also circulated in increasing measure. Christian Wolff had been invited repeatedly by Peter I and his successor Empress Catherine I to relocate to St Petersburg: he refused, but co-operated actively in the search for staff (mainly Germans) for the new Academy of Sciences. As in Germany, Wolff's became the dominant school philosophy in Russia during most of the eighteenth century, until supplanted by Kant; it was taught to succeeding generations of Russian students mainly through the textbooks of Wolff's populariser Friedrich- Christian Baumeister, repeatedly published in Russian translation.

Cameralist ideas also became important. As Marc Raeff emphasised in his pioneering account of cameralism in Russia, Peter's reign ‘was marked by the introduction of contemporary Western European norms in the political, cultural and institutional spheres – in short, a conscious taking over of the basic ideas of the well-ordered police state and of mercantilism and an effort to implement them in practice’. By the time of Empress Catherine II, the Great (ruled 1762–96), the full range of ideas of the period of the Enlightenment was available to educated members of the government and elites.