by Riazanovsky
for the time of the monarch's absence, it became a permanent body after his return. The number of senators was first set at nine and in 1712 increased to ten. A special high official, the Ober-Procurator, served as the link between the sovereign and the Senate and acted, in the emperor's own words, as "the sovereign's eye." Without his signature no Senate decision could go into effect; any disagreements between the Ober-Procurator and the Senate were to be settled by the monarch. Certain other officials and a chancellery were also attached to the Senate. While it underwent many subsequent changes, the Senate became one of the most important institutions of imperial Russia, especially in administration and law.
In 1717 and the years immediately following, Peter the Great established collegia, or colleges, in place of the old, numerous, overlapping, and unwieldy prikazy. The new agencies, comparable to the later ministries, were originally nine in number: the colleges of foreign affairs, war, navy, state expenses, state income, justice, financial inspection and control, commerce, and manufacturing. Later three colleges were added to deal with mining, estates, and town organization. Each college consisted of a president, a vice-president, four councilors, four assessors, a procurator, a secretary, and a chancellery. At first a qualified foreigner was included in every college, but as a rule not as president. At that time collegiate administration had found considerable favor and application in Europe. Peter the Great was especially influenced by the example of Sweden and also, possibly, by Leibniz's advice. It was argued that government by boards assured a greater variety and interplay of opinion, since decisions depended on the majority vote, not on the will of an individual, and that it contributed to a strictly legal and proper handling of state affairs. More bluntly, the emperor remarked that he did not have enough trustworthy assistants to put in full charge of the different branches of the executive and had, therefore, to rely on groups of men, who would keep check on one another. The colleges lasted for almost a century before they were replaced by ministries in the reign of Alexander I. Some prikazy, however, lingered on, and the old system went out of existence only gradually.
Local government also underwent reform. In 1699 towns were reorganized to facilitate taxation and obtain more revenue for the state. This system, run for the government by merchants, took little into account except finance and stemmed from Muscovite practices rather than Western influences. In 1720-21, on the other hand, Peter the Great introduced a thorough municipal reform along advanced European lines. Based on the elective principle and intended to stimulate the initiative and activity of the townspeople, the ambitious scheme failed to be translated into practice because of local inertia and ignorance.
Provincial reform provided probably the outstanding example of a
major reforming effort of Peter's come to naught. Again, changes began in a somewhat haphazard manner, largely under the pressure of war and a desperate search for money. After the reform of 1708 the country was divided into huge gubernii, or governments, eight, ten, and finally eleven in number. But with the legislation of 1719 a fully-developed and extremely far-reaching scheme appeared. Fifty provinces, each headed by a voevoda, became the main administrative units. They were subdivided into uezdy administered by commissars. The commissars, as well as a council of from two to four members attached to the voevoda, were to be elected by the local gentry from their midst. All officials received salaries and the old Muscovite practice of kormleniia - "feedings" - went out of existence. Peter the Great went beyond his Swedish model in charging provincial bodies with responsibility for local health, education, and economic development. And it deserves special notice that the reform of 1719 introduced into Russia a separation of administrative and judicial power. But all this proved to be premature and unrealistic. Local initiative could not be aroused, nor suitable officials found. The separation of administration and justice disappeared by about 1727, while some other ambitious aspects of the reform never came into more than paper existence. In the case of local government, Peter the Great's sweeping thought could find little or no application in Russian life.
The reign witnessed a strengthening of government control in certain borderlands. After the suppression of Bulavin's great revolt, the emperor tightened his grip on the Don area, and that territory came to be more closely linked to the rest of Russia. The cossacks, however, did retain a distinct administration, military organization, and way of life until the very end of the Russian empire and even into the Soviet period - as readers of the novels of Sholokhov realize. Similarly, after Mazepa's defection to Charles XII in Ukraine, the government proceeded to tie that land, too, more closely to the rest of the empire. For example, an interesting order in 1714 emphasized the desirability of mixing the Ukrainians and the Russians and of bringing Russian officials into Ukraine, buttressing its argument with references to successful English policies vis-a-vis Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
The change in the organization of the Church paralleled Peter the Great's reform of the government. When the reactionary patriarch Hadrian died in 1700, the tsar kept his seat vacant, and the Church was administered for over two decades by a mere locum tenens, the very able moderate supporter of reform Metropolitan Stephen Iavorsky. Finally in 1721, the so-called Spiritual Reglament, apparently written mainly by Archbishop Theophanes Prokopovich, established a new organization of the Church. The Holy Synod, consisting of ten, later twelve, clerics, replaced the patriarch. A lay official, the Ober-Procurator of the Holy
Synod, was appointed to see that that body carried on its work in a perfectly legal and correct manner. Although the new arrangement fell under the conciliar principle widespread in the Orthodox Church and although it received approval from the Eastern patriarchs, the reform belonged - as much as did Peter the Great's other reforms - to Western, not Muscovite or Byzantine, tradition. In particular, it tried to reproduce the relationship between Church and state in the Lutheran countries of northern Europe. Although it did not make Russia Byzantine as some writers assert, nor even caesaropapist - for the emperor did not acquire any authority in questions of faith - it did enable the government to exercise effective control over Church organization, possessions, and policies. If Muscovy had two supreme leaders, the tsar and the patriarch, only the tsar remained in the St. Petersburg era. The Holy Synod and the domination of the Church by the government lasted until 1917.
Peter the Great's other measures in the religious domain were similarly conditioned by his general outlook. He considered monks to be shirkers and wastrels and undertook steps to limit ecclesiastical possessions and eventually to control ecclesiastical wealth. On the other hand, he tried to strengthen and broaden Church schools and improve the lot of the impoverished secular clergy. As one might expect, the reformer exhibited more tolerance toward those of other denominations than had his Muscovite predecessors, on the whole preferring Protestants to Catholics. In 1721 the Holy Synod permitted intermarriage between the Orthodox and Western Christians. The emperor apparently felt no religious animosity toward the Old Believers and favored tolerance toward them. They, however, proved to be bitter opponents of his program of reform. Therefore, the relaxation in the treatment of the Old Believers early in the reign gave way to new restrictions and penalties, such as special taxation.
An evaluation of the total impact of Peter the Great's administrative reforms presents certain difficulties. These reforms copied and adapted Western models, trying to import into Russia the best institutions and practices to be found anywhere in Europe. Efforts to delimit clearly the authority of every agency, to separate powers and functions, to standardize procedure, and to spell out each detail could well be considered revolutionary from the old Muscovite point of view. On the surface at least the new system seemed to bear a greater resemblance to Sweden or the German states than to the realm of the good Tsar Alexis. The very names of the new institutions and the offices and technical terms associated with them testified to a flood of Western influences and a break with the Muscovite past. Yet reality dif
fered significantly from this appearance. Even where reforms survived - and sometimes, as in the case of the local government, they did not - the change turned out to be not nearly as profound as the emperor had intended. Statutes, prescriptions, and precise
rules looked good on paper; in actuality in the main cities and especially in the enormous expanses of provincial Russia, everything depended as of old on the initiative, ability, and behavior of officials. The kormleniia could be abolished, but not the all-pervasive bribery and corruption. Personal and largely arbitrary rule remained, in sum, the foundation of Russian administration; all the more so because despite the reformer's frantic efforts the new system, which was much too complicated to be discussed here with anything approaching completeness, lacked integration, co-ordination, and cohesion. In fact a few scholars, such as Platonov, have argued that the administrative order established by Peter the Great proved to be more disjointed and disorganized than that of Muscovite Russia.
Financial and Social Measures
The difficulty of transforming Russian reality into something new and Western becomes even more evident when we consider Peter the Great's social legslation and his overall influence on Russian society. Before turning to this topic, however, we must mention briefly the emperor's financial policies, for they played an important and continuous part in his plans and actions.
Peter the Great found himself constantly in dire need of money, and at times the need was utterly desperate. The only recourse was to squeeze still more out of the Russian masses, who were already overburdened and strained almost to the breaking point. According to one calculation, the revenue the government managed to exact in 1702 was twice, and in 1724 five and a half times, the revenue obtained in 1680. In the process it taxed almost everything, including beehives, mills, fisheries, beards, and bath houses; and it also extended the state monopoly to new items. For example, stamped paper, necessary for legal transactions, became an additional source of revenue for the state, and so did oak coffins. In fact, finding or concocting new ways to augment government funds developed into a peculiar kind of occupation in the course of the reign. Another and perhaps more significant change was in the main form of direct taxation; in 1718 Peter the Great introduced the head, or poll, tax in place of the household tax and the tax on cultivated land.
One purpose of the head tax was to catch shirkers who combined households or failed to till their land. It was levied on the entire lower class of population and it represented a heavy assessment - considerably heavier than the taxes that it replaced. Set at seventy or eighty kopecks per serf and at one ruble twenty kopecks for each state peasant and non-exempt townsman, the new tax had to be paid in money. From 1718 to 1722 a census, a so-called revision, of the population subject to the head tax took place. On private estates, serfs and those slaves who tilled the soil
were registered first. Next came orders to add to the lists household slaves and all dependent people not on the land, and finally even vagrants of every sort. Each person registered during the revision had to pay the same set head tax; on estates, the landlords were held responsible for the prompt flow of money to the treasury. A number of scholars have stressed that Peter the Great's tax legislation thus led to the final elimination of the ancient difference between serf and slave, and the merging of the landlords' peasants into one bonded mass. Legally the mass consisted of serfs, not slaves. In actuality, as already indicated, the arbitrary power of the landlord and the weakness of the peasant made Russian serfdom differ little from slavery. After the revision the serfs were allowed to leave the estate only with their master's written permission, a measure which marked the beginning of a passport system. The head tax, it might be added, proved to be one of the emperor's lasting innovations.
On the whole Peter the Great had to accept and did accept Russian society as it was, with serfdom and the economic and social dominance of the gentry. The emperor, however, made a tremendous effort to bend that society to serve his purposes: the successful prosecution of war, Westernization, and reform. Above all, the government needed money and men. The head tax presents an excellent example of an important social measure passed for financial reasons. But whereas the head tax affected the lower classes, other social groups also found themselves subject to the insatiable demands of the tireless emperor. For example, the merchants, the few professional people, and other middle class elements, who were all exempt from the head tax, had to work harder than ever before to discharge their obligations to the state in the economic domain and other fields of activity.
However, the emperor insisted on service especially in the case of the gentry. State service, of course, constituted an ancient obligation of that class. But, as we have already seen in dealing with the army, under Peter the Great it became a more regular and continuous as well as much heavier obligation. Every member of the gentry was required to serve from about the age of sixteen to the end of his days, and the sovereign himself often gave an examination to boys as young as fourteen or even ten and assigned them to schools and careers. After an inspection, held usually in Moscow, the gentry youths were divided roughly two-thirds to one-third between the military and the civilian branches of service. Peter the Great insisted that in the civilian offices as in the regiments or aboard ships all novices must start at the bottom and advance only according to their merit. In 1722 he promulgated the Table of Ranks, which fisted in hierarchic order the fourteen ranks, from the fourteenth to the first, to be attained in the parallel services - military, civil, and court. The Table, with its impressive ranks borrowed from abroad, served as the foundation
of the imperial Russian bureaucracy and lasted, with modifications, until 1917. The emperor opened advancement in service to all. Entrance into service brought personal nobility, while those of non-gentry origin who attained the eighth rank in the civil service or the twelfth in the military became hereditary members of the gentry. He also began to grant titles of nobility, including "prince," for extraordinary achievements, and later emperors continued this practice.
Peter the Great's handling of the gentry represented something of a tour de force, and it proved successful to the extent that the emperor did obtain a great deal of service from that class. But the reformer's successors could not maintain his drastic policies. In fact, we shall see how in the course of the eighteenth century the gentry gradually escaped from its service obligations. At the same time entry into that class became more difficult, so that Peter the Great's effort to open the road to all talents was somewhat diminished. It might be added that some of the emperor's social legislation failed virtually from the start. Thus, for example, in 1714, in opposition to the established Russian practice of dividing land among sons, the reformer issued a law of inheritance according to which the entire estate had to go to one son only - by choice, and to the elder son if no choice had been made - the others thus being forced to exist, as in the case of the British nobility, solely by service. But this law turned out to be extremely difficult to enforce even during Peter the Great's reign, and it was repealed as early as 1731.
The Development of the National Economy
The development of the national economy constituted another aim of the reformer and another field for his tireless activity. Again, the emperor thought first of war and its immediate demands. But, in addition, from about 1710 he strove to develop industries not related to military needs, to increase Russian exports, and in general to endow the country with a more varied and active economy. Peter the Great made every effort to stimulate private enterprise, but he also acted on a large scale directly through the state. Ideologically the emperor adhered to mercantilism, popular in Europe at the time, with its emphasis on the role of the government, a favorable balance of trade, and the protection of home industries as reflected in the Russian tariff of 1724. One account gives the figure of 200 manufacturing establishments founded in Peter the Great's reign - 86 by the state and 114 by private individuals and companies - to add to the 21 in existence in Rus
sia by 1695; another account mentions 250 such establishments in operation at the time of the emperor's death. The greatest development occurred in metallurgy, mining, and textiles. In effect, the emperor created the Russian textile industry, while he de-
veloped mining and metallurgy impressively from very modest beginnings, establishing them, notably, in the Urals. He promoted many other industries as well, including the production of china and glass.
To facilitate trade Peter the Great built canals and began the construction of a merchant marine. For instance, a canal was built between 1703 and 1709 to connect the Neva with the Volga. Indeed, the Volga-Don canal itself, finally completed by the Soviet government after the Second World War, had been one of the reformer's projects. In the course of Peter the Great's reign Russian foreign trade increased fourfold, although it continued to be handled in the main by foreign rather than Russian merchants. On the whole, although some of the emperor's economic undertakings failed and many exacted a heavy price, Peter the Great exercised a major and creative influence on the development of the Russian economy. Later periods built on his accomplishments - there was no turning back.
Education and Culture
There could be no turning back in culture either. In a sense Peter the Great's educational and cultural reforms proved to be the most lasting of all, for they pushed Russia firmly and irrevocably in the direction of the West. While these measures will be discussed in more detail in the chapter dealing with Russian culture in the eighteenth century, it should be pointed out here that they fitted well into the general pattern of the emperor's activity. Utilitarian in his approach, the sovereign stressed the necessity of at least a minimum education for service; and he also encouraged schools that would produce specialists, such as the School of Mathematics and Navigation established in 1701. His broader plans included compulsory education for the gentry - which could not be translated into practice at the time - and the creation of the Academy of Sciences to develop, guide, and crown learning in Russia. This academy did come into existence a few months after the reformer's death. Throughout his life Peter the Great showed a burning interest in science and technology as well as some interest in other areas of knowledge.