100 RUSSIA [HISTORY. Paul. styled the sixth great period of Russian legislation. The serfs, however, were not benefited by these changes. In 1767 an ukaze forbade them to bring any complaints against their masters. The latter had the power of send- ing their serfs to Siberia as a punishment, or handing them over to be enlisted in the army. The public sale of serfs was not put an end to till the reign of Alexander I. The country was now divided into governments for the better administration of justice, each government being subdivided into uiezdi or districts. Catherine also took away from the monasteries their lands and serfs, and allotted them payments according to their importance from the state revenues. The plans of Peter I. were thus fully carried out, and the church became entirely dependent upon the state. In 1783 the Crimea was annexed to Russia. A second war with Turkey broke out in 1787; the Ottoman power had many grounds of complaint, but its suspicions were particularly aroused by the tour of Catherine through the southern provinces of Russia and her interviews with the emperor Joseph II. Turkey declared war that same year; and, to increase the em- barrassed position of the empress, Sweden did the same, requiring from Russia the cession of the southern part of Finland which had been taken from her. But King Gustavus III., in spite of some petty successes, was unable to carry on the war, and soon signed the peace of Verela on the footing of status quo ante bellum. The empress met with equal good fortune in the south ; Potemkin took Otchakoff and Suwaroff Khotin. In 1789 the latter gene- ral won the battles of Fokshani and Kimnik ; and in 1790 after a sanguinary engagement he took Ismail. By the treaty of Jassy in 1792 Catherine kept possession of Otch- akoff, and the shore between the Bug and Dniester. She was next occupied with the affairs of Poland, which have been described under that heading. In consequence of the demands of the confederates of Targovica, men who were prepared to ruin their country for their own private ends, eighty thousand Russians and twenty thousand Cossacks entered the Ukraine to undo the work of the confederates of Bar. In 1794 Suwaroff stormed Warsaw, and the inhabitants were massacred. In the following year Stanislaus Poniatowski laid down his crown, the third division of Poland took place, and the independence of that country was at an end. In spite of her correspond- ence and affected sympathies with Voltaire, Diderot, and many of the advanced French thinkers, Catherine showed great opposition to the principles of the French Revolu- tion, and the policy of the latter part of her reign was reactionary. She died suddenly on November 17, 1796. Her character has been amply discussed by foreign writers. It may suffice to say here that, whatever her private vices may have been, she was unquestionably a woman of great genius, and the only sovereign worthy of Russia who had appeared since the days of Peter the Great. Hence the veneration with which her memory is regarded by the Russians to this day. Paul, who had lived in retirement during the life of his mother, was an object of aversion to her. We are told that she had prepared a will by which he would be disinherited, and the succession conferred upon his son Alexander, but his friend Kurakin got hold of it immediately upon the death of the empress and destroyed it. The events of the reign of PAUL (j.v.) can be only briefly discussed here. He concluded an alliance with Turkey, and entered into a coalition against the French republic, which he regarded with horror. Suwaroff took the command of the united Russian and Austrian troops at Verona. In 1799 he defeated the French general Moreau on the banks of the Adda, and made a triumphant entry into Milan. After this he won another victory over Macdonald on the Trebbia, and later the same year that of Novi over Joubert. He then crossed the Alps for the purpose of driving the French out of Switzerland, but he was everywhere hampered by the Austrians, and, after fighting his way over the Alps and suffering great losses, he reached his winter quarters between the Iller and the Lech, and soon afterwards he was recalled in disgrace. Paul now completely changed his tactics. Ac- cusing England and Austria of having acted treacherously towards him, he threw himself into the arms of Bonaparte, who had won him over by skilful diplomacy, and, among other pieces of flattery, sent back the Russian prisoners newly clothed and armed. Paul then meditated joining him in a plan for conquering India ; but in the night between the 23d and 24th of March 1801 he was assassinated. The chief agents in this catastrophe were Plato Zuboff, Benning- sen, and Pahlen. The rule of Paul had become intolerable, and he was fast bringing on a national bankruptcy. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Alexander I. Alexam (1801-1825). One of the first acts of the new emperor I- was to make peace with England and France. He, how- ever, soon changed his policy, and in 1805 joined the third coalition against France, to which Austria and England were parties. Events which belong to general European history, and are well known, need only be described briefly here. On December 2d of that year took place the battle of Austerlitz, in which the Russians lost 21,000 men, 133 guns, and 30 flags. They accused their Austrian allies of treachery. The war was soon ended by the treaty of Pressburg. We now come to the fourth coalition against France (1806-7). In 1807 Napoleon engaged the Russian general Benningsen at Eylau. The battle was protracted and sanguinary, but not decisive ; both parties abandoned the field and retired into winter quarters. A defeat at Friedland in the same year was followed by the peace of Tilsit. By this treaty the Prussian king, Frederick William III., lost half his dominions. Nearly all his Polish posses- sions were to go to the king of Saxony under the name of the grand-duchy of Warsaw. By a secret treaty, it seemed as if Alexander and Napoleon almost aspired to divide the world, or at least Europe, between them. The terms, how- ever, were received by a large party in Russia with disgust. The next important event in the reign of Alexander was the conquest of Finland. By the treaty of Frederikshamn, September 17, 1809, Sweden surrendered Finland, with the whole of East Bothnia, and a part of West Bothnia lying eastward of the river Tornea. The Finns were allowed a kind of autonomy, which they have preserved to this day. The annexation of Georgia to Russia was consolidated at the beginning of this reign, having been long in prepara- tion. It led to a war with Persia, which resulted in the incorporation of the province of Shirvan with the Russian empire in 1806. In 1809 commenced the fifth coalition against Napoleon. Alexander, who was obliged by treaty to furnish assistance to the French emperor, did all that he could to prevent the war. A quarrel with Turkey led to its invasion by a Russian army under Michelsen. This war was terminated by a congress held at Bucharest in 1812. Russia gave up Moldavia and Wallachia, which she had occupied, but kept Bessarabia, with the fortresses of Khotin and Bender. Gradually an estrangement took place between Alexander and Napoleon, not only on account of the creation of the grand-duchy of Warsaw, but because Russia was suffering greatly from the Continental blockade, to which Alexander had been forced to give his adhesion. This led to the great invasion of Russia by Napoleon in 1812. 1 1 This has been fully described in the pages of Eugene Labaume and Sir Robert Wilson. In the recent volumes of the excellent review, Russia, Arkhiv, edited by M. Bartenieff, will be found some most in- teresting details bsed upon Russian family papers and traditions.
