Russia under the Old regime

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favourably disposed to his reforms. The leading political theorist of Peter's reign, the man who introduced the concept of sovereignty to Russia, Feofan Prokopovich, came from this milieu. The works of Grotius, Pufendorf and Wolff which Peter ordered to be translated into Russian helped further to popularize concepts of western political thought.

As had been noted, Peter was interested in power, especially military power, not in westernization. In a sense, this had also been true of his predecessors in the seventeenth century. But unlike them, Peter, having been to western Europe and having formed close friendships with western Europeans, understood something about the nature of modern power. He realized, as they did not, that the practice of merciless skimming of the national wealth for the benefit of the treasury prevented the accumulation of more valuable forms of wealth lying underneath the surface - riches of an economic and cultural nature. Such resources had to be given a chance to mature. Borrowing terminology from another discipline, we may say that before Peter Russian rulers had treated their realm as would people at the hunting stage of civilization; with Peter, they turned into cultivators. The impulse towards instantaneous seizure of any desirable object in view now yielded gradually (and with occasional relapses) to the habit of development. Peter was only dimly aware of the implications of his steps in this direction, which he took less from philosophical preconceptions than from the instinct of a born statesman. His vigorous support of Russian manufacturers was motivated by the desire to free his military establishment from dependence on foreign suppliers; its actual long-term effect, however, was greatly to expand the foundations of Russian industry. His educational measures were intended, in the first place, to prepare gunnery experts and navigators. Peter himself had had a superficial education and valued only learning of a technical, applied kind. But in the long run his schools did for Russia much more than merely provide cadres of technicians; they created an educated elite which eventually became highly spiritualized and, indeed, turned violently against the whole service-oriented mentality which had made their existence possible in the first place.

It is under Peter that there emerges in Russia a sense of the state as something distinct from and superior to the monarch; narrow fiscal concerns now yield to a broader national vision. From 1702, Peter talked of 'the common good' {obshchee blago), 'general welfare' and 'the benefit of the whole nation'.10 He was the first Russian monarch to articulate the idea of Men public, and to express an interest in improving the lot of his subjects. Under Peter, public and private welfare appear for the first time in Russia as interconnected. A great deal of Peter's domestic activity had as its aim to make Russians conscious of a link