Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  Over two interrogation sessions, Alexei received forty blows of the knout, during which he confessed to having wished for Peter’s death. Confessions extracted under torture are notoriously unreliable, but this was probably nothing less than the truth. Peter had overshadowed Alexei’s whole life; his father had placed him under such intolerable pressure that he had risked everything in an attempt to live free of his influence. Alexei, no doubt, would have been better off by far if Peter had died years ago.

  Alexei’s final confession brought an end to the torture; it also resulted in a sentence of execution for treason and patricide. The verdict was powerless unless Peter signed it, however, and he did not do so immediately. It is possible that he was considering a pardon. Alexei was still his son, and in his own way, Peter loved him; it was to preserve Russia that he had subjected Alexei to trials and torture. There might still be a way to save Alexei’s life, even if he spent the rest of his days in prison.

  Before Peter was forced to make this painful decision, however, matters were taken out of his hands. A few days after the sentence of death was passed, Alexei died in prison. In a letter which Peter wrote to the court of Louis XV, he describes how:

  “In the midst of uncertain and distressing agitation, it pleased Almighty God, whose Holy Judgments are always just, to deliver by His divine grace our person and all our empire from all fear and danger and to end the days of our son Alexei, who died yesterday. As soon as he had convinced himself of the great crimes he had committed against us and all our empire, and had received the sentence of death, he was struck with a kind of apoplexy. When he recovered from this attack, having still his spirit and free word, he begged us to come to see him, which we did, accompanied by our ministers and senators, in spite of all the wrong he had done us. We found him with his eyes bathed in tears and marking a sincere repentance. He told us that he knew that the hand of God was on him and that he was at the point of accounting for all the actions of his life, and that he did not believe he would be able to be reconciled with God if he was not reconciled with his Sovereign Lord and father. After that he entered into new details of all that had passed, feeling himself guilty, confessed, received the Holy Sacraments, demanded our benediction and begged us to pardon all his crimes. We pardoned him as our paternal duty and the Christian religion obliged us to do.

  “This unexpected, sudden death has caused us a great sadness. However, we have found solace in believing that Divine Providence has wished to deliver us from all anxiety and to calm our empire. Thus we have found ourselves obliged to render thanks to God and to comport ourselves with all Christian humility in this sad circumstance.”

  Rumors circulated that the true cause of Alexei’s death was a final session of torture, crueler than even the first two, at which Peter was present. Others said that he had been beheaded in secret, and his head sewn back onto his body for the funeral. It is more probable that he died from the delayed effects of the knout; forty lashes in a single session could kill a strong man, and Alexei was thin and sickly. But it is certainly the case that Alexei’s death was convenient for Peter. He didn’t have to steel himself for the task of ordering and witnessing his own son’s execution. Alternatively, he didn’t have to figure out how to keep Alexei alive and safe from intrigue if he chose to pardon him.

  Peter’s behavior throughout the whole affair with Alexei makes it easy to understand why 17th century Europeans considered Russia to be a land of barbarians and savages. And yet, torture in treason cases was normal practice in every European nation in that era. And Peter was neither the first monarch in history to grow paranoid about the succession, nor the first father in history to place unreasonable demands on his son. He wasn’t even the first person to combine the two in a perfect storm of family tragedy and national crisis. Peter’s actions before and during the investigation clearly indicate that he was motivated by the desire to act as he thought best for the country he had, as he believed, been entrusted by God to safeguard. It is easy to paint a picture of him as a power-mad despot who could not brook any opposition. But none of the descriptions or documents that survive from this era indicate that Peter was out of his senses with rage or unhinged by paranoia. He was methodical in investigating Alexei’s actions, and he enlisted the cooperation of all his closest advisors and all the highest authorities in the nation to determine Alexei’s fate. Even when the death sentence was leveled against him, Peter did not rush to sign it.

  It seems evident that Peter’s failure to understand Alexei’s nature created a rift into which mistrust crept—and where Peter was concerned, more so than with any other Russian tsar, trust was key. The people who were closest to him and rose highest in his favor achieved their status because Peter felt that they understood him. Betrayal and bloodshed had marked him irrevocably as a child. It is common amongst people who have suffered a childhood trauma of such severity to have little tolerance for uncertainty, and Alexei represented fatal uncertainty to his father. The prospect of his succession created doubt as to whether the Russia Peter was building, which would inevitably still be a work in progress when he died, would survive after his lifetime. The ultimatum which drove Alexei to flee the country was a miscalculation on Peter’s part, but it was of a sort that many fathers might have been guilty of. Had he not been an emperor, such a miscalculation would not have had such tragic consequences.

  With his younger children, Peter enjoyed much closer relationships. His son Peter, known as Petrushka, was the only one of his sons who survived infancy. He was invested as Peter’s heir when he was two years old. Not wishing to repeat the mistakes he had made with Alexei, Peter supervised Petrushka’s education personally, instilling in him an early fondness for the same military games that had enlivened his own boyhood. Under Peter’s tutelage, Petrushka learned to “[drill] soldiers and fire cannon” with aplomb. When he died on April 25, 1719, at the age of four, Peter and Catherine were crushed. They had weathered the deaths of nine of their children, but Petrushka had survived long enough to make them hope for the future.

  The two children remaining to them were both daughters—Anna, born in 1708, and Elizaveta, born in 1709. Both girls were born illegitimate, but they were formally legitimized after Peter and Catherine married. Unlike Alexei, who had grown up in the old Russia and was already a man when Peter won his victory at Poltava, Anna and Elizaveta were princesses of the new Russia, and were raised to consider themselves the equals of the daughters of any monarchs in Europe. Their educations would reflect this status. As an adult, Elizaveta would recollect the pains that their father had taken with their studies. She believed that Peter regretted abandoning his formal education; he often came to Elizaveta and Anna in their classroom to ask them what they had learned that day. Both of the girls were clever, particularly Anna, who had a scholarly bent, in comparison to Elizaveta’s more pragmatic intelligence. Peter employed a French governess, who taught them to speak French, German, Spanish, and Swedish. An observer of the period remarked that, “[Anna] was a beautiful soul in a beautiful body…both in appearance and in manners, she was Peter’s complete likeness, particularly in her character and mind ... set off by her kind heart.” Her younger sister Elizaveta, was no less beautiful; her nickname, when she was older, was “the Russian Venus”.

  One of Peter’s greatest ambitions was to arrange a marriage between Elizaveta and Louis XV, who had succeeded his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, to the French throne when he was five years old. Elizaveta and he were the same age, and Elizaveta had been trained in the language, history, and courtly etiquette of France to prepare her for the marriage. If betrothal to the king was not an option, then some other high-born prince of the Bourbon house would do; once the marriage had taken place, Peter would install them, by force of arms if necessary, as king and queen of Poland. The French regent, Philippe d’Orleans, was interested in Peter’s offer and even offered his own son as a potential bridegroom for Elizaveta, though this required him to overcome his distaste for the
fact that Elizaveta’s mother had been born a peasant. But the French wanted Peter to depose Augustus of Poland before the marriage took place, while Peter wanted the children to marry immediately; he would send them to Poland when Augustus died. Ultimately, interference from the English, who were now allies of the French and enemies of Russia, prevented the match from being made. But fate had a higher destiny in mind for Elizaveta, who would one day become empress of Russia.

  Chapter Five: The Legacy of Peter the Great

  Civil reform

  In 1717, eight years after Poltava and eight years before his death, Peter had a conversation with Prince Jacob Dolgoruky, one of his oldest, most trusted advisors, a man upon whom Peter relied absolutely to speak the truth without fear of the tsar’s anger. He asked him to consider the reign of his father, tsar Alexis, and compare it to his own reign. Prince Dolgoruky replied at length:

  “A tsar has three main duties to perform. The most important is the administration of the country and the dispensation of justice. Your father had enough time to attend to this, while you have had none, which is why your father accomplished more than you. It is possible that when you do give some thought to this manner—and it is time you did—you will do more than your father.

  “A tsar’s second duty is to the organization of the army. Here again, your father is to be praised because he laid the foundations of a regular army, thereby showing you the way. Unfortunately, certain misguided men undid all his work, so that you had to start all over again, and I must admit that you have done very well. Even so, I still do not know which of you has done better; we will only know when the war is over.

  “And, finally, we come to a tsar’s third duty, which is building a fleet, making treaties and determining our relationship with foreign countries. Here, and I hope you will agree with me, you have achieved more than your father. For this, you deserve much praise. Somebody tonight said that a tsar’s work depends on his ministers. I disagree and think the opposite, since a wise monarch will choose wise counselors who know their worth. Therefore, a wise monarch will not tolerate stupid counselors because he will know their quality and be able to distinguish good advice from bad.”

  As a summary of Peter’s reign to date, it was masterful. The war with Sweden had not ended in Poltava, though ultimately the power of the Swedish army had been broken there. Charles XII had fled into exile beyond the borders of the Ottoman empire, where he remained under the sultan’s protection until 1710, when Peter invaded the Baltic peninsula in order to seize him. The Pruth campaign was a nearly unmitigated disaster for Peter, who was forced to cede Azov back to the Ottomans as part of his peace settlement with the sultan.

  War had taken up nearly all of Peter’s energy since he returned from his first journey west, and this was reflected in the administration of the Russian government. All power in Russia was concentrated in the hands of the autocrat; there were no legislators, independent or otherwise, with the authority to write or enact laws while the tsar’s attention was occupied by other things. Thus far, Peter had governed by issuing edicts, usually in the form of scraps of paper on which he had scrawled a few sentences above his signature. He usually did not have the time to explain or discuss how his edicts were to be carried out, so this was left to his chief ministers, who often had their own agendas. A robust government has architects of policy who design broad-reaching laws that work together for the good of the country. Peter had no time to design such policies except as they pertained to building up the army, creating the navy, and drafting the necessary labor to build St. Petersburg.

  All of this was about to change. The war with Sweden came to an effective end in 1718, when Charles XII was killed by a stray musket shot while inspecting trenches during his Norwegian campaign. This freed Peter to spend the last eight years of his life reforming the administration of his government. In 1711, before embarking on the Pruth river campaign, he had created the Senate, a legislative and administrative body to rule Russia in his absence. It had no power in itself, however, and the senators did not always take the job seriously. They were required to meet for three days a week, but not until Peter placed imperial guards in the senate room did the senators show up for work regularly. Even then, they were more inclined to drink and joke than attend to business. When they accomplished anything, it was usually due to the efforts of the First Senator, Jacob Dolgoruky, whose will was so strong and his devotion to the good of his country so great that he once dared Peter’s ire by tearing up a decree he had issued, because he believed Peter had not thought it through carefully. When Peter demanded an explanation, Dolgoruky replied, “It is my zeal for your honor and the good of your subjects. Do not be angry, Peter Alexeevich, that I have too much confidence in your wisdom to think you wish, like Charles XII, to desolate your country.” Dolgoruky proceeded to explain his reason for opposing the edict, which had called for serfs to be requisitioned from St. Petersburg and Novgorod for the digging of the Ladoga Canal. These were the provinces that had been hit hardest by war requisitions; it made more sense to order serfs from other more populous provinces, and supplement their numbers with the labor of Swedish prisoners of war. Peter listened calmly, then ordered that everything be done as Dolgoruky had advised.

  The Senate would have to be reformed if it was to be an effective arm of the government; Jacob Dolgoruky would not live forever, after all. Accordingly, Peter created the office of the Procurator General. He would not be a voting member of the Senate, but he would be its President, the tsar’s eyes and ears on the council, who would relate Peter’s wishes and oversee the Senate’s efforts to carry them out. Furthermore, Peter came to recognize that the Senate had more work than it could handle, because it was responsible for both legislative and administrative duties. In the future, the Senate would be in charge of legislation only; the administration of the government was placed in the hands of “colleges”, or ministries. There were nine of them: Foreign Affairs, Revenue Collection, Justice, Expenditure, Financial Control, War, Admiralty, Commerce, and Mining and Manufacturing. Each college would have a Russian president and a foreign vice-president. The college presidents would also serve as members of the Senate, effectively creating a cabinet of ministers. In a single stroke, Peter had modernized the Russian government, taking as his model the governments of England, Holland, and especially Sweden, where the government had continued to function seamlessly for fifteen years despite the fact that Charles XII had been fighting wars on foreign soil for most of his reign.

  Peter’s new government did not function smoothly right away. In most of his communications with the Senate, Peter took the tone of an angry parent or overtaxed schoolteacher, berating them for wasting time, gossiping, and failing to turn their assignments in on time. The governmental models he was attempting to emulate were not autocracies; to a certain extent, their monarchs were answerable to the people, and this made a considerable difference. An Englishman of high rank could be dismissed and disgraced for failing to execute the duties of his office, but he could not be summarily executed or exiled on the whim of the king. Peter’s ministers, by contrast, were painfully aware that they could be sent to Siberia if they displeased him. Peter needed the people who ran his government to be self-motivated and independent, but as he gradually came to realize, it is impossible to force people to act independently. His ministers were naturally reluctant to assume responsibility when they knew that Peter was looking over their shoulder, waiting for them to make a wrong move.

  After 1716, Peter altered his approach. He realized that it was necessary for officials at every level of government to understand the essential principles of governing before they could be expected to use their own judgment to make decisions. “Because I so order it,” is the implicit reasoning that lies behind the decrees of all autocrats. Peter’s new approach could be summarized as, “I so order it because,” followed by a thorough explanation of why a certain piece of legislation was needed, citing historical precedents and common sense
arguments. Future tsars of Russia would follow this example, most famously Catherine the Great, who in 1767 convened a special assembly of representatives from across Russia, including all classes of society and all religious and ethnic groups, to perform a complete review and overhaul of the Russian legal code. Prior to convening the assembly, she spent two years writing a document called the Nakaz, or Instructions to the Legislative Assembly, which was nothing less than a master class in the theory of government, distilled in a few thousand words for the benefit of the people.

  Probably the most unpopular of all Peter’s civil reforms was the law that mandated a minimum of twenty-five years of state service for every able-bodied son of the nobility. Starting at the age of ten, boys from noble families were sent to schools where they were to complete five years of study in reading, writing, elementary arithmetic and geometry, after which they were awarded a certificate of completion. Unless a young man could produce one of these certificates, he was not allowed to marry. At the age of fifteen, boys were sent to the military or naval academies; almost everyone preferred the military, and the classrooms of the naval academies had to be filled by conscription. Young men could also fulfill their service to the state by working for the civil service, but since this was considered the softer, safer option, Peter was forced to decree that only one son from each family could follow that route. This policy of mandatory state service was so unpopular that people often resorted to desperate measures to evade it, feigning illness, madness, or injury. Some became monks; others simply fled into the vast Russian countryside, where Peter’s clerks could not find them. When Peter’s grandson, Peter III, came to the throne, one of his first acts was to repeal the requirement for mandatory service, which made him very popular until he was deposed by Catherine the Great seven months later.