A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

5 Peter the Great

The reign of Peter the Great saw the greatest transformation in Russia until the revolution of 1917. Unlike the Soviet revolution, Peter’s transformation of Russia had little impact on the social order, for serfdom remained and the nobility remained their masters. What Peter changed was the structure and form of the state, turning the traditional Russian tsardom into a variant of European monarchy. At the same time he profoundly transformed Russian culture, a contribution that along with his new capital of St. Petersburg has lasted to the present day.

The first few years of Peter’s rule gave little indication that such great events were coming. The removal of Sofia in 1689 gave control to Peter’s mother and her Naryshkin relatives and their allies, who seem to have gotten along poorly with one another once in power. A son Aleksei was born in 1692 to Peter’s wife Evdokiia, so the succession seemed assured. Peter himself remained in the background training his soldiers, drinking with the foreign officers in the German suburbs, and sailing his boats. Peter had many eccentricities, and they appeared early. He was nearly seven feet tall, but was thin-boned with narrow shoulders and rather fine features. He shaved his beard early but left a thin moustache. His capacity for alcohol was gigantic and this perhaps had some relationship to the endless “colics” and other stomach disorders that plagued him all his life. He sometimes flew into tremendous hysterical rages that only his wife (his second, Catherine) was able to calm. His relations with women were surprisingly restrained. His greatest recreation was anything that involved boats, leading him to go north to Archangel in 1693 to see the ocean for the first time. His mother Natalia sent him a letter ordering him not to go out to the dangerous open sea and he obeyed. Then in February 1694, she died. Right away Peter ceased to appear at any of the Kremlin ceremonies, and the whole ritual of the Russian court, now over two centuries old, came to an end. Then Peter went to Archangel again, and this time he went out to sea on a Dutch ship.

During these years Peter made two acquaintances in the German suburb who were to shape his policy for the next few years. One was Patrick Gordon, then in his fifties, a Catholic Scot who had served in the Russian army since 1661, primarily as a specialist in fortification and artillery. Gordon was a firm proponent of the Turkish war and played a crucial role in training the new European style regiments of the army. The other was Francois LeFort, a Geneva Swiss who was also a mercenary officer, but whose relationship with Peter was more personal than Gordon’s. LeFort was the ringleader of many of the drunken parties, and it was LeFort who introduced Peter to Anna Mons, the daughter of a German tavern keeper. These relations were not just friendships, as Gordon and LeFort were the young tsar’s favorites and informal political advisors, and Anna cemented the influence of LeFort.

When Peter returned to Moscow from his first brief sea voyage in the fall of 1694, he decided to renew Russia’s efforts against the Turks, largely in abeyance since he came to power. The boyars were not happy with this decision, but he simply ignored them, and moved an army south down the Volga and Don rivers to Azov, the Turkish fort at the mouth of the Don on the Sea of Azov. The siege was unsuccessful, largely because the Turks could resupply the fort from the sea; so Peter built a navy. He built it at Voronezh on the Don, far inland, with Dutch carpenters and ship builders. He brought officers from the Netherlands, Venice, and France, and in the spring of 1696 his fleet sailed down the Don and with its help he took the fort, which was his first victory. He celebrated his victory not just with the traditional prayers, but also with a triumphal procession into Moscow in full Baroque style, with arches bearing images of Hercules and one with Julius Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered” in Church Slavic. So that the public would understand these strange gods, he had a pamphlet printed to explain it all.

Peter then prepared for an action far more strange than his Baroque triumph – a journey to Western Europe. He quickly settled the affairs of the new territories and the navy and appointed a small committee of boyars to govern in his absence, only to find that there was a conspiracy to replace him afoot among other aristocrats. The conspirators were few in number but Peter saw them as growing from the seed of the old factions that had opposed his mother in the 1680s. The conspirators were mainly concerned about their own positions in the hierarchy of offices, but some were also shocked at his trip abroad and even more at his plans to send young boyars to Holland and Venice to learn foreign languages and the art of navigation. The conspirators were executed, and Peter left Moscow, stopping at Riga and Berlin before he arrived in Amsterdam, which was his chief goal.

Peter traveled incognito as a member of the Russian embassy headed by the boyar Fyodor Golovin and Lefort, an embassy with the charge of strengthening the coalition against the Ottomans. While Golovin and LeFort negotiated, Peter took instruction in carpentry and ship building in the shipyards of Zaandam. There the Dutch told him that in England they built ships differently, relying on mathematics and not just their eyes to shape the hull. Peter quickly set off for London, where he visited the shipyards but also spoke to astronomers at the Greenwich observatory, attended a Quaker meeting, inspected the Royal mint, and talked to Anglican clergymen. Then he began the journey home, reaching Vienna by spring. As he rode through Central Europe, however, the political horizon was changing rapidly. Austria had reconquered huge parts of Hungary and was low on resources, as were the other allies. They wanted peace, and Peter learned this in Vienna. He had to now extricate Russia from the war with the Ottomans, and he eventually succeeded after two years of hard negotiation. Peter was disappointed, but the end of the war was actually a relief, for more pressing concerns had arisen.

In the summer of 1698 he had news from Moscow that the musketeers had revolted once again, demanding better conditions, and apparently they were in some sort of contact with the imprisoned Sofia. Peter rushed home, only to find that the boyars had already executed the leaders over the advice of the generals. Peter was furious, and ordered a relentless and gruesome interrogation of the prisoners under torture. Hundreds were eventually executed with the participation of the tsar and the boyars. Peter never got to the bottom of the musketeers’ motives, and he suspected the boyars, even those to whom he had entrusted the government, of concealing evidence or worse. As the interrogation drew to a close, Peter decided that he could no longer work with the boyars because they were too quarrelsome among themselves and unreliable. Henceforth he would rely on his favorites.

Peter had returned from Europe with two new favorites, Golovin and a junior officer of bombardiers, Alexander Menshikov. Gordon and LeFort wanted Peter to maintain his alliance with Austria and prepare for another Turkish war, but he had other plans, and in any case both Gordon and LeFort died about this time. Golovin came from an old boyar family and was well educated. He had negotiated the treaty of Nerchinsk that delimited their mutual border with China, and had succeeded in part because he could speak to the Jesuits at the Chinese court in Latin. Menshikov was the exact opposite, the son of a falconer at the court who had served in Peter’s play regiments, which became his guards. Menshikov had little education, though he had acquired enough “soldier’s German” to speak to foreigners who lacked Russian. Menshikov was also LeFort’s replacement at the drinking parties and Peter’s close personal friend. They also both supported Peter’s divorce from his wife Evdokiia, the mother of his son Aleksei. Most important, they both supported Peter’s new project, the war with Sweden.

The war with Sweden would occupy most of the rest of Peter’s reign. On its eve Peter decreed the first of his reforms, mandating that men of the upper classes must shave their beards, and that both sexes of the gentry must henceforth wear Western clothing in place of traditional Russian dress. He also ordered the year to be dated from the birth of Christ, not the creation of the world so that Russia would be in keeping with the educated world as he saw it. These decrees aroused a certain amount of discontent, especially the new dress. Boyar women in particular did not like the new clothing, as it meant that their hair was not covered (and thus their new dress was immodest) and they could not manage the stockings and high heels. Many of them wore the new clothes only at court, switching back to traditional dress at home.

Peter also began to reorder the state. The collecting of taxes from townspeople was taken from the provincial governors and put in the hands of the urban elites, and he imposed a stamp duty on official papers. These were experiments, eventually abandoned, but a more basic change was silent. Peter ceased to create boyars and call the boyar duma. Similarly, when the patriarch of the church died in 1701, Peter allowed no new patriarch to be chosen and appointed the Ukrainian abbot Stefan Iavorskii as “conservator of the patriarchal throne.” Thus the traditional and canonical head of the Orthodox church in Russia simply disappeared. To make matters worse, Peter also took control of the revenues of the monastic estates, keeping most of them and doling out a stipend for the use of the monks. Peter wanted to ensure revenue for his war, and did not want any interference from the aristocracy or the church.

The war with Sweden was a response to Peter’s disappointment in the outcome of the Azov campaigns. He had taken the fort to be sure, and gained an outlet to the Black Sea, more or less, but the Turks would not permit the Russians to trade on the Black Sea much less pass the Bosporus into the Mediterranean. Russia had reentered the war too late to derive much benefit from its victory. As Peter was returning from Vienna in 1698 to deal with the musketeer revolt, he had a long meeting with the new king of Poland, Augustus of Saxony. Augustus had large ambitions and considered himself a great military commander. He wanted to seize Sweden’s Baltic provinces, an old demand of the Polish nobility, but he also wanted to use them to strengthen his very shaky position in Poland. His natural allies against Sweden, the hegemonic power of northern Europe, were Denmark and Russia, and he was able to recruit Peter to his cause.

As is so often the case in war, all the initial calculations were wrong. Augustus’ small army tried to take Riga in 1700, but failed ignominiously. The young king of Sweden Charles XII, a born battlefield commander, knocked Denmark out of the war in a matter of weeks, and then shipped his army to the Baltic provinces. Peter had moved his newly trained European-style army to besiege the town of Narva in Swedish Estonia. Charles marched swiftly to the attack, landed on the unprepared Russians in the middle of a snowstorm and routed them. Only Peter’s guards regiments were able to withdraw in order, and most of the foreign and Russian officers were captured. Peter had to begin all over again. Fortunately, Charles had other plans. Contemptuous of Russian capabilities, he turned his attention to Poland, spending the next eight years dethroning Augustus and setting up a Swedish puppet in his place. Peter had a breathing space and he used it well.

What was Peter trying to accomplish in going to war against Sweden, a power that everyone thought virtually invincible? Officially he announced that he was recovering the territory lost at the end of the Time of Troubles, that is, the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland where St. Petersburg now stands. This was ancient Russian territory (that was true) and thus his patrimony. At the same time Peter wanted a port for Russia more convenient for trade and communication than distant Archangel. Azov had not worked out, and the only other option was the Baltic shore. Indeed Narva had been the object of Ivan the Terrible’s wars a century and a half earlier. Peter had no way of knowing that the war would turn into an epic duel that would change the face of northern and eastern Europe, and it seems that his initial aims were modest. Again like so many wars, the conflict acquired a logic of its own and ended in ways that no one could have imagined.

For the time being, the war absorbed all his energies and those of the state. Administration was concentrated in the hands of Peter’s favorites Golovin and Menshikov, but this arrangement meant that government was essentially improvised. During this period Peter had no court, for he spent most of his time with the army or in his small houses around Moscow, especially the residence in Preobrazhenskoe. His style of life at this time and ever after was unique for a Russian or European monarch. He went about the country and the army with no guards and no suite, but he took his lathe and woodworking tools with him everywhere. The absence of a court suited him perfectly, as he hated any sort of ceremonial and the court amusements that were usual in most of Europe. His idea of a good time was to arrange a great drunken celebration with his officers or Dutch sea captains and end the evening with fireworks.

The scene of these amusements, and of the government as well, was increasingly in his new city, St. Petersburg. The city was the result of his persistence after the defeat at Narva. Peter rebuilt his army and sent it into the Baltic provinces, in effect training it under fire in many small engagements with the enemy. In 1702 he felt confident enough to move against a larger objective, the Swedish fort on the Neva River, Nöteborg. He took it after a short siege and renamed it, ignoring the previous Russian name and calling it Schlüsselburg, in German the “Key Castle.” The next year he moved down the Neva and quickly seized the small Swedish town at its mouth, where he immediately began to build a new fortress, the fortress of St. Peter and Paul, to defend the area from sea and land. Around the fortress he began to build a new city as a naval base and a potential commercial port for Russia on the Baltic. He was not waiting for the war to end, and through the years to come in the darkest moments of the war, it was St. Petersburg that was his one unshakeable demand.

There were plenty of dark moments. By 1706 Charles had managed to force Augustus to abdicate the Polish throne and in the next two years the Swedish king gradually moved east through Poland to expel Augustus’s remaining supporters and the Russian army. Charles was fresh from a long series of victories and hailed in Europe as one of the world’s great commanders, so it is not surprising that he had far-reaching plans to rely on boyar and popular dissent to overthrow Peter and establish a weak and compliant government in Moscow. His assumption was that Peter’s army could not effectively oppose him. As the Swedes moved toward the Russian border, however, their situation rapidly deteriorated. The Russians had stripped most of the land of food and fodder and Charles’s army was low on supplies. To make things worse, each encounter with the Russian army revealed that Peter’s officers were learning their profession, and Swedish successes came harder each time. Then Charles reached the Russian border and stopped to rest, hoping that his manifestos had caused discontent to boil over among the Russian boyars and people, but nothing happened. Russia was quiet, and winter was coming on. Charles decided to turn south into the Ukrainian Hetmanate, but first he hoped to join up with a Swedish relief army coming from Riga that had fresh supplies. At Lesnaia Peter struck. Moving his dragoons rapidly through the forest he fell on the relief army, driving it from the field and seizing its supplies. Charles now had more men but no fresh supplies.

For the moment his hope was in the Ukrainians. He had long been in secret correspondence with the Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who promised to rebel against the Russian tsar and bring over the whole Ukrainian Cossack host. When Charles arrived in the Ukraine, however, only some of the Cossack generals and a few thousand men joined him. The rank and file Cossacks would not follow and remained loyal to the tsar. Thus the Swedes settled down for the winter, finding adequate food but no military supplies. When spring came, the Swedish king moved northeast toward Moscow, but stopped to besiege the fortified town of Poltava so as not to leave enemy troops in his rear.

Peter decided to make his move. He marched his army toward the town but instead of attacking, he constructed a fortified camp on the outskirts and waited. Charles would have to attack him soon, for clouds of Cossacks made foraging impossible. On the morning of June 27, 1709, the invincible Swedish army marched through the morning mist toward the Russian camp and turned right, ready to attack. Peter brought his artillery out to meet them, and about ten o’clock the Swedes moved forward in frontal attack, a maneuver that had so often brought them victory. This time it failed. Peter’s guns cut them to pieces, and the Swedish line stuck fast in close combat with the Russians, and then broke. By noon Charles’s army was a mass of refugees heading west for the Dniepr River, and Russia had become a great power.

The victory at Poltava was the turning point of Peter’s reign, for it ensured that eventually he would emerge the victor and keep St. Petersburg. It also radically changed his and Russia’s position in Europe. Charles had already given the final blow to Polish power and prestige, and now Peter had done the same to Sweden. He was free to concentrate on securing his conquests, and in 1710 he wrapped up the Baltic provinces and took the Finnish town of Viborg, thereby ensuring his new city, soon to be his new capital, of a protective belt of territory as well as several new ports for his empire.

The war with Sweden dragged on until 1721, for Charles was much too courageous and too stubborn to give up, even when he had lost all of Sweden’s possessions in Germany, the Baltic provinces, and Finland. To defeat him Peter had to maintain his army and use it and create a navy in the Baltic Sea, based in St. Petersburg. The navy in particular was extremely expensive, though vital to pressure Sweden to make peace. When peace came at last, Peter returned Finland to Sweden, minus Viborg, but kept the Baltic provinces. St. Petersburg was secure.

The strain of the war very soon required Peter to think more carefully about the structure of his state. Golovin’s untimely death in 1706 made change urgent. In 1708 he formally replaced both the traditional central offices as well as the improvised chancelleries of his favorites with the governors of eight huge provinces that took over most of the business of taxation, recruitment, and the courts. The new arrangement was not just a change in formal structure, for Peter appointed men from old aristocratic families (such as the Golitsyns and Streshnev) as well as his in-laws (the Apraksins), and, of course, “Aleksashka” Menshikov to run St. Petersburg and the huge province around it. The resulting decentralization left a gap in the center, so in 1711 he established the Senate as a coordinating body, particularly to work when he was away. Prince Iakov Dolgorukii, fresh from a daring escape from Swedish captivity, was its president, and aristocrats and their clients were prominent among its members. Peter had created a new balance in the government, combining great aristocrats with his favorite Menshikov. The balance was further enhanced by the appearance of a new favorite and Menshikov’s rival, Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii (Prince Iakov’s cousin). The prince held no major office, but was always present at court and employed in a series of delicate and confidential matters.

Peter now had the beginnings of a court again in St. Petersburg. He also ordered the government offices to the new city, and required the aristocracy and many merchants to move there and build houses. This was not a popular idea, for the new capital was expensive, damp, subject to flooding, and far from the Russian heartland. The merchants could not trade easily as long as the war continued, and the aristocracy was particularly unhappy with the need to leave their warm and comfortable Moscow mansions for the banks of the Neva. Peter himself built no great palace in his new city, no Russian Versailles. His Winter and Summer “Palaces” in St. Petersburg were essentially six-room houses suitable for a modest country gentleman. Peter’s new court was small and unostentatious, in keeping with his residences. Moreover the physical center of the new city was not the tsar’s palace but the Admiralty, the administrative center of the navy and its principal site for shipbuilding. The main avenue of the new city, Nevsky Prospect, began at the Admiralty, not the palace, and the radial avenues laid out after Peter’s death began at the same place. In Peter’s final plan, the government would have its seat on Vasil’ev Island on the north side of the river, across the water from the Winter Palace and the Admiralty. The island would also serve as the main center for commerce. The main harbor was still at Kronstadt, as the waters were too shallow near the city. The country villas of the tsar and elite stretching along the Gulf of Finland to the southwest were an integral part of the new city. These were modest houses with extensive gardens, modeled on the Dutch villas along the Vecht River near Utrecht. Among the villas stood the ancestor of the now magnificent Peterhof, then a modest country house for the tsar notable only for the fountains and gardens. Menshikov’s palace at Oranienbaum farther along the coast was much larger and grander. Peter’s plan was in fact too modest, and the government gradually moved south to be near the tsar in the Winter Palace. The architecture of the city after his death quickly grew very much grander. The city that would become a great imperial capital with Roman arches and classical architecture and ornament started its existence as a modest port and royal residence in north European style.

Figure 5. Peter the Great. Engraving after the equestrian statue of Peter by Etienne-Maurice Falconet erected at the order of Catherine the Great in 1782.

Peter built his new city and court with a new wife at his side. This was Catherine, and her story was perhaps the strangest of the whole era. When the Russian armies began to move into the Baltic provinces, one of the local Lutheran pastors had a maid named Marta, and she with the rest of the family was taken off to Moscow as part of the policy of harrying the area. There her master set up a school. Marta came to the attention of Peter around 1704, and she became his mistress in place of Anna Mons. When Marta accepted Orthodoxy and took the name Catherine, Peter married her in 1712. By this time they already had several children, all girls, one of them, born in 1709, who would be the future empress Elizabeth. Catherine was a strong and important figure in the court, generally allied with Menshikov but also working to keep harmony when crises threatened, and to moderate Peter’s anger when it overflowed.

In this new city Peter set about once more to reorder the structure of church and state. In 1715 he sent one Heinrich Fick, a German jurist, as a spy to Sweden, whose mission was to study the Swedish administrative system. Fick returned with detailed knowledge, and on this basis Peter began the process of recreating a central government to be headed by Colleges, each run by a committee consisting of Russian officials and foreign experts. Peter was also increasingly discontented with Stefan Iavorskii, who had strong notions of episcopal power and believed that Russia needed to exterminate heretics. Iavorskii came into conflict with both the tsar and the Senate over the case of an obscure religious dissident in Moscow, and though Peter partially conceded to Iavorskii’s demands for executions, he decided to place the church under a new system. Another Ukrainian bishop, Feofan Prokopovich, recently arrived in Petersburg, had the task of finding a suitable arrangement.

These were major changes and they took time to elaborate, especially with the continuing war with Sweden. Other concerns were equally prominent in the tsar’s mind. In the autumn of 1714 Peter discovered the extent of corruption on the part of Menshikov and many other major officials. The building of St. Petersburg was a particular gold mine for corruption, as thousands of peasants were conscripted every year to work; feeding and paying them was an obvious area for padding the work rolls and underpaying the workmen. The guilty officials were whipped and sent into exile, and Menshikov was sentenced to return literally millions of rubles to the treasury. He kept his position as governor of St. Petersburg, but lost the tsar’s favor. At court the Dolgorukiis and their allies were triumphant. Menshikov was not the only problem. Peter’s son by his first wife, Aleksei Petrovich, was now in his twenties, and had proved a serious disappointment to his father. Peter had given him a Western education, had him taught German and French, history and geography, but he did not take to it very well. A German wife (sister to the Emperor Karl VI’s wife) did not help either, as Aleksei treated her with coldness and contempt and found a mistress among his servants. Aleksei was lazy, uninterested in learning, politics, or warfare and preferred drinking with his circle of servants and clergy. Stefan Iavorskii began to see him as a future advocate of church interests, perhaps wrongly, but he let his views be known. Relations between father and son worsened, and the existence of Peter’s second wife Catherine meant that other heirs to the throne might be born. Finally, in 1715, both Catherine and Aleksei’s wife gave birth to sons almost simultaneously. There were now two possible heirs if Peter chose to bypass his eldest son. The tsar wrote to Aleksei chiding him for his indifference to the qualities needed for a future ruler, and Aleksei responded by offering to enter a monastery. Peter gave him another warning, and then went off to Western Europe to look after the continuing war and to do more traveling, this time to France.

While Peter was away a crisis arose in the supply of the Russian army in Finland, and the Senate, with its aristocratic supporters, dragged their feet. Peter was furious and sent order after order, but nothing happened. Menshikov stepped in to commandeer ships and send the supplies, thus instantly restoring himself to favor. His crimes were forgiven. A few weeks later, Aleksei Petrovich, the heir to the Russian throne, disappeared from Petersburg. For several weeks, no one knew where he was. Finally Peter’s emissaries found him in Vienna, where he had gone to take refuge with Emperor Karl, Aleksei’s brother-in-law, a man seriously unhappy with Peter’s rise to power and his potential influence in Germany. The Emperor gave him shelter, and Aleksei proposed to Karl’s ministers that he be given an army to overthrow his father. This was a tall order, and the Austrians feared Peter’s reaction, so they hid the tsarevich, first in the Tirol and then in Naples. There Peter sent one of his diplomats, Peter Tolstoi, to bring him back, and Tolstoi succeeded, in the process laying the foundation of the fortunes of the Tolstoi family for two centuries.

Aleksei returned to Moscow in January 1718. Thus began a long interrogation during which the extent of Aleksei’s support among the aristocracy and church became evident, not least because the tsarevich himself informed on them all. His sympathizers included the other favorite, Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii, Stefan Iavorskii, and many great aristocrats. As far as Peter could tell, they had not planned anything specific, but they also had known of Aleksei’s flight to Vienna. Peter faced a dilemma: either he could punish them all in imitation of Ivan the Terrible, or he could minimize the whole affair by punishing a few and thus cover it up. With some persuasion from his wife, he chose the second alternative. A dozen or so persons of low rank were executed. Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii and others were exiled, and Aleksei brought before the assembled Senate, ministers, generals, and high clergy for trial. The laymen voted for the death penalty, with dozens of men named by Aleksei as his supporters signing the document. Before Peter made a final decision about execution, the tsarevich died, probably from the aftereffects of judicial torture, but no information that is reliable exists about the cause of death.

Be that as it may, Peter’s problem was solved. He decreed that henceforth the tsar could choose his successor at will. He then proceeded to implement the new form of government, the Colleges, and to place over the church a new institution, the Holy Synod, a committee of clergy and laymen with a lay “Ober-procuror” as its head. This structure came from Prokopovich’s reading of Swedish legislation for the Lutheran church, and was a sharp break with Orthodox tradition. In the new arrangement the tsar became the “protector” of the church, and in practice he appointed the members of the Synod. The church would no longer be able to play a role in politics and oppose his reforms.

The seven years from the death of Aleksei to the death of Peter himself in January 1725 saw the culmination of Peter’s reordering of government, culture, and his foreign policy. The end of the Swedish war was a great relief, but he did not rest on his laurels. He immediately set off to use the momentary political confusion in Iran to seize some of its northern provinces, a scheme abandoned after his death but revealing of Peter’s thinking. The motivations here were purely commercial: control of the silk-producing areas of Iran, greater access to the Iranian market, and further on to the markets of the Near East and India. Utterly impractical, the plans show the extent to which Peter wanted to graft commercial appendages onto his agrarian empire.

With the restoration of central government, Peter established a Table of Ranks to replace the old court and military ranks he had allowed to lapse. It established an equivalency of civilian and military ranks, and provided for ennoblement of plebeians whose talents allowed them to advance. As a framework for the Russian state administration it lasted until 1917. In the same years Peter also tried to reorganize Russian provincial administration, redrawing the large provinces into fifty small ones, with subdivisions and a separation of administration and the judiciary all based on a Swedish model. Russia, however, lacked the resources for such a system, and after Peter’s death the number of provinces was reduced to fourteen, with another crucial administrative layer below the provincial governors. All this tinkering did not solve the problem of ruling a vast state with limited resources.

Peter’s victories added a new element to the Russian state in the form of the Baltic provinces of Estland and Livonia. For the first time Russia had territories with a powerful local elite that was not Orthodox. The loss of their privileges and lands to Swedish absolutism had led many of the German nobility of the area to support Peter and when he finally pushed out the Swedes in 1710 he granted the nobility their old privileges, including local courts, diets, and control of the Lutheran church on their estates. Elected town government was restored in the hands of the urban German merchants. In the Ukrainian Hetmanate, Peter took a stronger hand, for he engineered the election of Ivan Skoropadskii to replace the pro-Swedish Mazepa in 1708, and then, on Skoropadskii’s death in 1722, abolished the office of hetman altogether. He left, however, the rest of the Hetmanate’s political and legal structure intact and it survived until the 1780s. Thus Russia had not only new territories and peoples, but distinct legal and local political systems in Livonia and the Ukrainian Hetmanate, both differing from the Russian structure. In both places traditional privileges and a system of local elections kept power and wealth in the hands of the local nobility, while the tsar appointed governors to exercise general supervision.

Peter’s intervention in the border provinces was limited. In the inner Russian provinces he proceeded with more new and reformed institutions. After 1718 he replaced the old Russian tax system and his own innumerable financial improvisations with a single tax, the “soul tax,” to be paid by all non-nobles, which also structured finance and social relations until the 1860s. Some of these measures lasted and some did not, but all of them meant that the Russian state now had its basic institutions, their powers and duties, spelled out in law for the first time. The laws were published and provided with elaborate prefaces giving out the rationale for each measure. The new system of government now looked formally more or less the same as that of the rest of Europe’s monarchies.

Along with the new form of government came a new culture. Peter did not suppress the old religious culture, he merely began to import a new one – the secular culture of contemporary Europe. He sent hundreds of young noblemen abroad, encouraged and sometimes directed the translation and printing of European books – not great classics but the textbooks of history, architecture, mathematics, geography, and other subjects. In the last years of his life he sent his personal librarian abroad to recruit scientists for an academy of sciences to be established in St. Petersburg, instructing the librarian to particularly look for mathematicians and physical scientists. The project was on the point of realization when he died, but his wife and successor formally established the academy in his memory. The result was the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1725. Peter was not only interested in science and art, but he also wanted to Europeanize Russia’s social habits. In the european thought of the time, a cultivated and polished people were necessary for an orderly state. Thus in 1719, Peter decreed that the nobility was to change its forms of socializing. The all-male banquets of the old days were to end, and in their place the nobility were to hold a sort of open house (known as “assemblies”) on particular days, and invite their acquaintances including those of lesser rank. Amusements were to be cultivated – music, dancing, and card-playing – and most important, the assemblies must include women. Like so many of Peter’s cultural decrees, it required what had already come into fairly general practice, As the diplomats immediately realized, the assemblies were also a perfect point of exchange of information about politics and simply the news of the day.

Almost the last thing he did before he died was to order the translation of the German jurist and historian Samuel Puffendorf’s book, On the Duties of Man and the Citizen. A widely read popular account of the nature of the state, it founded government ultimately on natural law and a contract among men in the state of nature. Puffendorf also stressed the ruler’s duty to work for the general good, not just his own, and the citizen’s duty of obedience without any sort of rebellion. He thought natural law was the work of God, but otherwise he strictly separated the state and its laws from divine commands. For Peter this meant that the tsar was still the sovereign, but the character of his rule was based on natural and human law, not merely tradition and the ruler’s personal piety. Western political thought had entered Russia.

Peter the Great, with his personal eccentricities and the scale of his accomplishment was a ruler unique in Russian history. For most of the eighteenth century he was the great ideal of the Russian monarchy and its supporters at home and abroad. As time passed, Peter’s image changed, for already in Catherine’s time conservative noblemen began to complain, echoing their ancestors of Peter’s time, that Peter had imported foreign ways to Russia, undermining its ancient religion and morality. In the nineteenth century a full-blown quarrel broke out about this issue, pitting liberal and radical Westernizers against Slavophile admirers of Russian tradition – that is, Peter’s admirers were pitted against his detractors. This was a dispute fraught with metaphysics and national pride, but the question remains: What did Peter really accomplish?

The most obvious answer has to do with religion. The administrative subordination of the church to the tsar was only one side of the changes Peter wrought, however important. Peter was determined to put the church in its place, but he was not irreligious. He attended the liturgy at least once a week in St. Petersburg and more often during Lent and Easter week. His style of religious observance in other respects deviated from traditional Orthodoxy. After his mother’s death, he never made a pilgrimage to any of the many shrines of miraculous relics and icons. In his new capital there was only one monastery, in contrast to the dozens in Moscow, and it was founded only in 1714. Peter went there on occasion, but the attraction was the sermons of the Ukrainian monks, which Peter sought out and seems to have enjoyed. The monastery was dedicated to Prince Alexander Nevskii, certainly a saint in the Orthodox Church, but one known mainly for his military victories, including that over the Swedes on the Neva. In case the significance of the choice was not clear enough, Peter ordered the celebration of the saint’s feast day moved from the traditional November 30 to August 23, the day of the conclusion of the treaty of Nystad that ended his own war with Sweden. Peter knew his scripture and liturgy, and could trade biblical quotations with his correspondents, but his personal piety was the outgrowth of the cultural changes in Russian Orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, the emphasis on sermons and learning over miracles and monasticism.

The key here is the change in emphasis: Peter did not abolish monasteries or suppress the devotion to miracle-working relics. Similarly Peter was not out to eliminate religion. The consequence of his policies was to end the universal domination of religion in Russian culture, and to reduce it to the place it held in the mental life of early modern Europe after the Renaissance: a foundational belief system in a society whose high culture was already secular. Thus he accomplished in thirty-six years a change in Russian culture that took centuries in Western Europe.

The new secular culture imported into Russia in Peter’s time was undoubtedly European. At the time, no one thought of it that way. Neither Russians nor Europeans used the terms “Westernization” or “Europeanization.” They thought Peter had brought education and culture in place of ignorance, light in the place of darkness. Moreover, the term “European,” can be misleading, as it conceals the choices Peter as well as other Russians made among the great variety of European culture. Peter’s personal tastes were unusual to say the least. He had what some contemporaries called a “mathematical mind,” meaning that he was interested in what was then understood to be mathematics. That meant not just a theoretical science of numbers, but also mechanics, hydraulics, fortification, surveying, astronomy, architecture, and many other sciences and techniques that employed more or less mathematics. There were no European monarchs who shared these tastes and they were unknown among Russian aristocrats at his court. He also had a passion for the Dutch, their language, their ships, their engineering and architecture, and their painting. In general his personal culture took its inspiration from Protestant northern Europe, and from there he borrowed his laws and administration, his navy, the engineering for his new capital, and much more. His architects, however, were more German or Italian, in spite of his Dutch leanings, and his sculptors were Italian. His choices were eclectic as were those of the other Russians, mostly aristocrats, whose cultural interests in Western Europe we can trace. Many of the aristocrats, and apparently all of Peter’s opponents, were more attracted by the culture of Catholic southern Europe and Poland – by the Baroque grandeur of Rome and the aristocratic constitutions of Venice and Poland. Some parts of European culture had not yet arrived in Russia, jurisprudence, medicine, and the scholarly study of the classics. For the time being the result was a strange mixture of Baroque Europe and the early Enlightenment, a combination of disparate and sometimes contradictory elements derived from European thought and culture.

Part of the cultural transformation of Russia was a new conception of the state. The traditional Russian state’s goals were very simple: maintenance of the power of the tsar and his government at home and abroad and the conservation of the state by the just and Christian behavior of the rulers. Peter introduced a secular goal, the good of the state (including its subjects) as well as the means to achieving that goal, that is, the establishment of good and legal order and the education of the elite in European culture. It was the latter in particular that Peter’s spokesmen repeatedly stressed, proclaiming that he had brought light (learning) into darkness (ignorance), and that is also how Peter’s European contemporaries saw his achievement. Equally important was the creation of explicit written and legal foundations of governmental institutions, not a constitution in the modern sense, but a sharp break with the customary, unwritten, foundations of previous Russian government. The structure he created was noticeably similar to European monarchies, and was accepted as such in the West. It shared with many European states one fundamental contradiction, that the monarch was the source of all law. That being the case, how could the legal order be preserved if the ruler chose to ignore it? Eventually this contradiction in the continental European states could only be resolved by the French Revolution and its consequences, but for the time it seemed to work.

The Russian state looked like Europe, but it had its peculiarities. Russia lacked one important institution that was universal in European states, a trained legal profession. Russia was not to get a university with a law faculty until 1755, and a trained legal profession came only in the nineteenth century. Another typically Russian problem with Peter’s state was that its new features were concentrated in St. Petersburg. The tsar’s reform of provincial administration had never been very effective, languished for lack of suitable personnel, and was abolished after his death. Unlike European monarchies, Russia lacked an administrative structure dense enough and well trained enough to execute the sovereign’s will on provincial society. Unimpeachably enlightened measures formulated in the capital did not affect the provinces, and just to collect taxes Peter often had to rely on specially delegated military officers. To some extent the new state floated in the air over a society that was not changing with the pace of the capital or even Moscow. For the peasants, relations with the state had hardly changed.

With all these limitations, however, Peter succeeded and transformed his country forever. He did not do this without the aid of some previous changes, particularly in the culture of the church and the boyar elite in the last decades of the seventeenth century. His reordering of the state, however, had no precedent, and came out of his early improvisations and the decision to adopt Swedish models of administration. Peter did not do all of this alone. A major part of his success was his political skill in managing a reluctant aristocracy that inevitably lost part of its power in the new arrangements. The aristocrats, legends aside, were not boyars in long beards trying to restore Orthodox Russia as it was in 1650. They too were European, but with different goals and interests from the tsar, and Peter managed them by including enough of them in the new government, army, and diplomatic corps to keep them quiet if not fully satisfied. Peter also had popular discontent to contend with, and that did have an element of cultural conservatism. When this discontent turned into rebellion, he suppressed it with savage punishments, to the approval of Europe. No one supported rebels against the crown. With the aristocrats Peter worked entirely differently, pretending to ignore their sympathy for his son and keeping them in the center of government along with his favorites and Western experts until the end of his reign. Thus Peter kept the elite together and allied with him and his policies. His mastery of court politics was as important as his relentless determination and iron will.

Peter’s death in January 1725, plunged Russia into a political crisis, for one of the many paradoxes of his reign is that he did not carry out the provisions of his decree permitting the tsar to nominate his heir. Therefore at his death there were several possible alternatives: his wife Catherine, crowned his empress the previous year; his ten-year-old grandson Peter by the unfortunate Aleksei; and several daughters by Catherine. The latter were too young or married abroad, and the choice came down to Catherine or Peter under a regency. The ruling elite split over the choice, but after considerable pressure from the guards regiments, the Senate opted for Catherine. For the first time the guards made their wishes felt and opted for a woman. Though Catherine had a reputation as a very strong personality (“the heart of a lion,” said the French ambassador), she did not prove an effective ruler, and very soon state business went to Menshikov and a Supreme Privy Council formed to manage the state. Then Catherine died in 1727. Menshikov seemed poised for supreme power with a boy tsar, but the aristocrats proved too powerful, and the Supreme Privy Council exiled him to Siberia, where he died. The Princes Dolgorukii and Golitsyn were masters of the government and they signaled a new course, moving the capital back to Moscow. They cemented their position by marrying the young tsar to a Dolgorukii princess. Then fate intervened. Suddenly in 1730 Peter II died of smallpox. The aristocrats had to find a new monarch, and they did not choose Peter’s remaining daughter Elizabeth but his niece, Anna, the daughter of his erstwhile co-tsar Ivan V. Anna ruled in Baltic Kurland as the widow of the Duke, and was quickly summoned to Moscow. At the same time the aristocrats decided to hold on to power by compiling a series of conditions that Anna would have to sign to ascend the throne, conditions giving power to the sitting members of the Supreme Privy Council, the Dolgorukiis and Golitsyns. Here they made a fatal error, for the conditions gave power not to the aristocracy as a whole, but to a clique of families. As the English ambassador reported, the Russian aristocrats “have no true notions of a limited government.” When Anna came to Moscow, she quickly sized up the situation and with the support of the other aristocratic clans, the rank and file nobility, and the guards, she tore up the conditions and restored autocracy. Russia was back on the road Peter had mapped out, but with another woman on the throne who had no direct heirs, male or female. No one knew that for the next sixty-six years Russia’s rulers would be women, like Anna, put on the throne by male aristocrats and guards officers.