Russia under the Old regime

THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE

the proprietary serfs to their landlords' arbitrary authority. By the end of the eighteenth century, the peasant no longer has any civil rights left and in so far as his legal status is concerned (but not social or economic condition), he can scarcely be distinguished from a slave.

The service estate also did not escape the reformer's heavy hand. Peter wanted to make absolutely certain that he extracted from this group the best performance possible, and with this aim in mind introduced several innovations concerning education and service promotion which, as long as he was alive to see that they were enforced, made their lives more onerous as well.

Pre-Petrine Russia had no schools and its service class was overwhelmingly illiterate. Apart from the higher echelons of the officialdom and the scribes (d'iaki) few servitors had more than a nodding acquaintance with the alphabet. Peter found this situation intolerable because his modernized army required men capable of assuming administrative and technical responsibilities of some sophistication (e.g. navigation and artillery plotting). Hence he had no choice but to create schools for his servitors and to make sure that they attended them. A series of decrees made it obligatory for dvoriane to present male pre-adolescents for a government inspection, following which they were sent either into the service or to school. Henceforth, hordes of young boys, torn out of their rural nests, were called for periodic inspections to towns to be looked over (sometimes by the Emperor himself) and registered by officials of the Heroldmeister's office which assumed the duties of the old Razriad. A decree of 1714 forbade priests to issue dvoriane marriage certificates until they could present proof of competence in arithmetics and the essentials of geometry. Compulsory education lasted five years. At fifteen, the youths entered active service, often in the same Guard regiment in which they had received their schooling. Peter's educational reform had the effect of pushing back the age of compulsory state service to the very threshold of childhood. Of his reforms, this was one of the most despised.

Another of Peter's reforms which deeply affected the life of the service class concerned the conditions of advancement. Traditionally in Russia, promotion in service rank depended less on merit than on ancestry. Although mestnichestvo had been abolished before Peter's accession, the aristocratic element remained well embedded in the service structure. Members of clans enrolled in the Moscow dvorianstvo enjoyed distinct advantages over the provincial dvoriane in appointments to the choicer offices, while commoners were barred from the service altogether. Peter would have found discrimination of this kind distasteful even if it redounded to his advantage. Given his view of the Muscovite upper class as ignorant, irrationally conservative and xenophobic, it was a foregone