In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian elite used a plethora of languages, situated in a complex web of shifting social values. This chapter charts the development of this multilingualism. Looking closely at the nature of language hierarchies in imperial Russia through a close study of a variety of archival materials, it questions the oft-repeated narrative of a Russian high society speaking predominantly French, to the detriment of their Russian skills. The chapter also examines whether the Russian case is, as is often claimed, unique, and argues that multilingualism in Russia shared characteristics with elite multilingualism found in other places and times.

Imperial Russia combined elements of the European early modern military‒fiscal state with features familiar to historians of Eurasian empires. The core of Russian international power was a professional, regular army organised and trained on European lines, sustained by effective administrative and fiscal institutions, and rooted in the tight alliance between a strong monarchy and a hereditary landowning and service nobility which took Europe as its model. To these sources of power Russia’s Eurasian imperial heritage added strategic depth and enormous natural resources. Russia’s Cossack irregular cavalry, heirs to an old tradition of Eurasian steppe warfare, played a major role in Napoleon’s defeat in 1812‒14. Even more important was the fact that the Russian Empire stood first in the world as regards horsepower in an era when the horse was vital to success in war. Together with these structural elements of Russian power the ability of the Russian army to learn and apply the lessons of Revolutionary and Napoleonic era warfare made a crucial contribution to its triumph in 1812‒14.

Tsar Aleksei came to power on his father’s death without controversy. His first marriage, to Mariia Miloslavskaia, produced several sons, the first being Tsarevich Aleksei. His father designated him as his heir in a new public ceremony in the Kremlin in 1667, complete with brief speeches. The new ceremony was part of the new culture of the court, poetry and declamations authored by the Kiev-educated monk Simeon Polotkii. The model was the Baroque court culture of Poland and Central Europe. The death of tsarevich Aleksei and his mother led Tsar Aleksei to remarry in 1671. The second wife was Natal’ia Naryshkina, whose first son was the later Peter the Great. Tsar Aleksei designated as his heir Mariia’s second son Fyodor, who succeeded in 1676. His own two marriages produced no heirs. On his death the boyar elite and the church proclaimed the boy Peter as tsar, but the musketeers preferred Aleksei’s third son, the incapable Ivan Alekseevich. The result was two boy co-tsars under the regency of their older sister Sofiia. Peter overthrew her and her favorites in 1689, ruling in name with his brother.

Peter the Great’s son Aleksei, born 1690, was given a European education. With no brothers, he was the heir, though Peter sent his mother to a convent. From 1707 Aleksei participated in court events and in the administration of the state. Foreign courts and Peter sought a bride, and he married Charlotte of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel in 1711. Their first son, Peter, was born in 1715. The same year Peter’s second wife, Ekaterina, bore a son, also named Peter. Aleksei was the hope of oppositional elements among the elite, and his conflicts with his father led to his flight to the Habsburgs in 1716. Returned to Russia, the heir was tried and condemned, but died in prison in 1718. Tsar Peter proclaimed his son Peter as the heir, but he died in 1719. Peter and his half-brother Ivan V had both produced many daughters, and the heir was not obvious. Peter’s grandson by Aleksei, Petr Alekseevich, was alive and healthy.

Imperial Russia’s most popular historical novel was not War and Peace but a story of folkloric origins that celebrated freedom and poked fun at authority. The Legend of How a Soldier Saved Peter the Great from Death appeared in multiple versions from 1843 onward and drew upon mythologies of the Fool – in sacred accounts, the Holy Fool (Iurodivyi); in secular tales, little Ivan the Fool (Ivanushka-Durachok). The hero of Russia’s first commercialized folktale, Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf, tricks a tsar as the protagonist of the contemporaneous children’s classic, The Little Humpbacked Horse. The freedom of fools was attractive enough in traditional society; amidst multi-dimensional change after the Emancipation, the idea of release from traditional constraint was electrifying. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others created a dialogue between the familiar and the new by peopling their works with recognizable characters, foremost among which was the Fool. In so doing they illuminated ideas of self-fulfillment free from oppressive and unjust authority. But the era’s authors and readers also knew that when authority seemed most in shadow, it could return in force. The tension between freedom and order reflected ambivalence toward each that endured in Russian traditions and new works.