penalty. In 1743 she expressed her discomfort with the practice, and in laws of
1751 and 1753 the Senate essentially replaced it with exile for all but the highest
crime. Executions were rare in this century: Catherine II is said to have been
reluctant to transport the rebel Pugachev to Moscow for a staged theatrical
execution, and in the end she had him beheaded before being drawn and quartered
in Bolotnaia Square south of the Kremlin in 1775. The Enlightenment writings of
Cesare Beccaria shaped her condemnation of judicial torture in theInstructionof
- Russia’s use of torture had already declined over the century, its use being
more formally regulated by decrees of the 1740s and 1750s. In his brief reign Paul
I, famous for military ethos and discipline, restored public executions and judicial
torture and rescinded the nobility’s freedom from corporal punishment, but his
successor Alexander I reversed these moves and abolished judicial torture in 1801.
Russia became more intentional and effective in exerting empire-wide control in
the eighteenth century, particularly in the second half. Throughout the century it
expanded roads and communication systems. Provisioning the army and the
populace advanced, and public health measures became more systematic. The
1775 administrative reforms provided a denser and more homogeneousfiscal,
bureaucratic, and judicial network, separating powers between these realms; they
also increased social welfare services and surveillance tasks in each gubernia with
mapping, census-taking, road construction, and development of the postal system.
Distance, of course, mattered: European Russia was far better served with roads and
communications than the borderlands; eastern Siberia continued to be a vast realm
sparsely settled and lightly touched by Russian administration. Nevertheless, in
vision and in achievement, the empire was more mobilized and better connected by
the end of this century.
*****
On roads and communications, see bibliography cited in Chapter 7 and John
W. Randolph,“The Singing Coachman or, The Road and Russia’s Ethnographic
Invention in Early Modern Times,”Journal of Early Modern History11 (2007): 33–61.
On waterways: Robert E. Jones,Bread upon the Waters: The St. Petersburg Grain Trade
and the Russian Economy, 1703– 1811 (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2013) and
R. A. French,“Canals in Pre-Revolutionary Russia,”in James H. Bater and R. A. French,
Studies in Russian Historical Geography, 2 vols. (London: Academic Press, 1983), 2:
451 – 81. On travel by road: Tracy Nichols Busch, “Connecting an Empire:
Eighteenth-Century Russian Roads, from Peter to Catherine,”Journal of Transport
History29 (2008): 240–58; Alexandra Bekasova,“The Making of Passengers in the
Russian Empire: Coach-Transport Companies, Guidebooks, and National Identity in
Russia, 1820–1860,”in John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin, eds.,Russia in Motion:
Cultures of Human Mobility since 1850(Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2012),
199 – 217. Reprint edn. of John Perry’s 1716 memoir:The State of Russia under the Present
Czar(London: Cass, 1967).
On military provisioning, see William C. Fuller,Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600– 1914
(New York: Free Press, 1992); John L. H. Keep,Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in
Russia, 1462– 1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter,From
Serf to Russian Soldier(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); John Keep,352 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801