Russia under the Old regime

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distances of hundreds of miles, usually under military escort and sometimes loaded down with chains to prevent desertions. Despite these precautions, so many escaped that according to recent estimates, Peter in no one year secured more than 20,000 men. Of this number many died from exposure and disease. By such Asiatic means was constructed Russia's 'window on the west'. The truly revolutionary element in Peter's reforms was concealed from contemporaries, and even Peter himself scarcely understood it. It lay in the idea of the state as an organization serving a higher ideal - the public good - and in its corollary, the idea of society as the state's partner.

Until the middle of the seventeenth century, Russians had no notion of either 'state' or 'society'. The 'state', in so far as they thought of it at all, meant to them the sovereign, the gosudar' or dominus, that is, his person, his private staff and his patrimony. As for 'society', it was not perceived as a whole but as fragmented into discrete 'ranks'. In the west, both these concepts had been well developed since the thirteenth century under the influence of feudal practices and Roman law and even the most authoritarian kings did not lose sight of them.* The idea of state as an entity distinct from the sovereign entered the Russian vocabulary in the seventeenth century, but it gained currency only at the beginning of the eighteenth, in the reign of Peter. 'Society' made its appearance later yet; at any rate, the Russian word for it, obshchestvo, seems to have originated in the reign of Catherine the Great.

As one might expect, Russians drew their idea of statehood mainly from western books. The transmittal, however, was, in the first instance indirect. The agents responsible for its transplantation to Russia were Orthodox clerics from the Ukraine, where ever since the Counter Reformation, the Orthodox church had been subjected to strong Catholic pressures. Resistance to it compelled the Ukrainian Orthodox establishment to familiarize itself with western theology and other branches of learning of which the Muscovite fraternity in its isolation remained blissfully ignorant. In 1632 the Ukrainian clergy founded in Kiev (then still under Polish rule) an academy for the training of Orthodox priests, the curriculum of which was modelled on the Jesuit schools in Poland and Italy which many of its faculty had attended. After Kiev had come under Russian authority (1667) these Ukrainians began to exert a powerful intellectual influence on Russia. Peter much preferred them to the Muscovite priesthood because they were more enlightened and more

* The famous pronouncement of Louis xiv, 'L'Etat, c'est moi', which breathes a sentiment so contrary to the entire western tradition, is of doubtful provenance and probably apocryphal. Far more characteristic, as well as being authentic, are the words uttered by Louis on his deathbed: 'I am going but the state lives for ever'; Fritz Hartung and Roland Mousnier in Relazioni del X Congresso Internationale di Science Storiche (Florence 1955), IV, p. 9.