For the moment his hope was in the Ukrainians. He had long been in secret correspondence with the Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who promised to rebel against the Russian tsar and bring over the whole Ukrainian Cossack host. When Charles arrived in the Ukraine, however, only some of the Cossack generals and a few thousand men joined him. The rank and file Cossacks would not follow and remained loyal to the tsar. Thus the Swedes settled down for the winter, finding adequate food but no military supplies. When spring came, the Swedish king moved northeast toward Moscow, but stopped to besiege the fortified town of Poltava so as not to leave enemy troops in his rear.
Peter decided to make his move. He marched his army toward the town but instead of attacking, he constructed a fortified camp on the outskirts and waited. Charles would have to attack him soon, for clouds of Cossacks made foraging impossible. On the morning of June 27, 1709, the invincible Swedish army marched through the morning mist toward the Russian camp and turned right, ready to attack. Peter brought his artillery out to meet them, and about ten o’clock the Swedes moved forward in frontal attack, a maneuver that had so often brought them victory. This time it failed. Peter’s guns cut them to pieces, and the Swedish line stuck fast in close combat with the Russians, and then broke. By noon Charles’s army was a mass of refugees heading west for the Dniepr River, and Russia had become a great power.
The victory at Poltava was the turning point of Peter’s reign, for it ensured that eventually he would emerge the victor and keep St. Petersburg. It also radically changed his and Russia’s position in Europe. Charles had already given the final blow to Polish power and prestige, and now Peter had done the same to Sweden. He was free to concentrate on securing his conquests, and in 1710 he wrapped up the Baltic provinces and took the Finnish town of Viborg, thereby ensuring his new city, soon to be his new capital, of a protective belt of territory as well as several new ports for his empire.
The war with Sweden dragged on until 1721, for Charles was much too courageous and too stubborn to give up, even when he had lost all of Sweden’s possessions in Germany, the Baltic provinces, and Finland. To defeat him Peter had to maintain his army and use it and create a navy in the Baltic Sea, based in St. Petersburg. The navy in particular was extremely expensive, though vital to pressure Sweden to make peace. When peace came at last, Peter returned Finland to Sweden, minus Viborg, but kept the Baltic provinces. St. Petersburg was secure.
The strain of the war very soon required Peter to think more carefully about the structure of his state. Golovin’s untimely death in 1706 made change urgent. In 1708 he formally replaced both the traditional central offices as well as the improvised chancelleries of his favorites with the governors of eight huge provinces that took over most of the business of taxation, recruitment, and the courts. The new arrangement was not just a change in formal structure, for Peter appointed men from old aristocratic families (such as the Golitsyns and Streshnev) as well as his in-laws (the Apraksins), and, of course, “Aleksashka” Menshikov to run St. Petersburg and the huge province around it. The resulting decentralization left a gap in the center, so in 1711 he established the Senate as a coordinating body, particularly to work when he was away. Prince Iakov Dolgorukii, fresh from a daring escape from Swedish captivity, was its president, and aristocrats and their clients were prominent among its members. Peter had created a new balance in the government, combining great aristocrats with his favorite Menshikov. The balance was further enhanced by the appearance of a new favorite and Menshikov’s rival, Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii (Prince Iakov’s cousin). The prince held no major office, but was always present at court and employed in a series of delicate and confidential matters.
Peter now had the beginnings of a court again in St. Petersburg. He also ordered the government offices to the new city, and required the aristocracy and many merchants to move there and build houses. This was not a popular idea, for the new capital was expensive, damp, subject to flooding, and far from the Russian heartland. The merchants could not trade easily as long as the war continued, and the aristocracy was particularly unhappy with the need to leave their warm and comfortable Moscow mansions for the banks of the Neva. Peter himself built no great palace in his new city, no Russian Versailles. His Winter and Summer “Palaces” in St. Petersburg were essentially six-room houses suitable for a modest country gentleman. Peter’s new court was small and unostentatious, in keeping with his residences. Moreover the physical center of the new city was not the tsar’s palace but the Admiralty, the administrative center of the navy and its principal site for shipbuilding. The main avenue of the new city, Nevsky Prospect, began at the Admiralty, not the palace, and the radial avenues laid out after Peter’s death began at the same place. In Peter’s final plan, the government would have its seat on Vasil’ev Island on the north side of the river, across the water from the Winter Palace and the Admiralty. The island would also serve as the main center for commerce. The main harbor was still at Kronstadt, as the waters were too shallow near the city. The country villas of the tsar and elite stretching along the Gulf of Finland to the southwest were an integral part of the new city. These were modest houses with extensive gardens, modeled on the Dutch villas along the Vecht River near Utrecht. Among the villas stood the ancestor of the now magnificent Peterhof, then a modest country house for the tsar notable only for the fountains and gardens. Menshikov’s palace at Oranienbaum farther along the coast was much larger and grander. Peter’s plan was in fact too modest, and the government gradually moved south to be near the tsar in the Winter Palace. The architecture of the city after his death quickly grew very much grander. The city that would become a great imperial capital with Roman arches and classical architecture and ornament started its existence as a modest port and royal residence in north European style.
Figure 5. Peter the Great. Engraving after the equestrian statue of Peter by Etienne-Maurice Falconet erected at the order of Catherine the Great in 1782.
Peter built his new city and court with a new wife at his side. This was Catherine, and her story was perhaps the strangest of the whole era. When the Russian armies began to move into the Baltic provinces, one of the local Lutheran pastors had a maid named Marta, and she with the rest of the family was taken off to Moscow as part of the policy of harrying the area. There her master set up a school. Marta came to the attention of Peter around 1704, and she became his mistress in place of Anna Mons. When Marta accepted Orthodoxy and took the name Catherine, Peter married her in 1712. By this time they already had several children, all girls, one of them, born in 1709, who would be the future empress Elizabeth. Catherine was a strong and important figure in the court, generally allied with Menshikov but also working to keep harmony when crises threatened, and to moderate Peter’s anger when it overflowed.
In this new city Peter set about once more to reorder the structure of church and state. In 1715 he sent one Heinrich Fick, a German jurist, as a spy to Sweden, whose mission was to study the Swedish administrative system. Fick returned with detailed knowledge, and on this basis Peter began the process of recreating a central government to be headed by Colleges, each run by a committee consisting of Russian officials and foreign experts. Peter was also increasingly discontented with Stefan Iavorskii, who had strong notions of episcopal power and believed that Russia needed to exterminate heretics. Iavorskii came into conflict with both the tsar and the Senate over the case of an obscure religious dissident in Moscow, and though Peter partially conceded to Iavorskii’s demands for executions, he decided to place the church under a new system. Another Ukrainian bishop, Feofan Prokopovich, recently arrived in Petersburg, had the task of finding a suitable arrangement.
These were major changes and they took time to elaborate, especially with the continuing war with Sweden. Other concerns were equally prominent in the tsar’s mind. In the autumn of 1714 Peter discovered the extent of corruption on the part of Menshikov and many other major officials. The building of St. Petersburg was a particular gold mine fo
r corruption, as thousands of peasants were conscripted every year to work; feeding and paying them was an obvious area for padding the work rolls and underpaying the workmen. The guilty officials were whipped and sent into exile, and Menshikov was sentenced to return literally millions of rubles to the treasury. He kept his position as governor of St. Petersburg, but lost the tsar’s favor. At court the Dolgorukiis and their allies were triumphant. Menshikov was not the only problem. Peter’s son by his first wife, Aleksei Petrovich, was now in his twenties, and had proved a serious disappointment to his father. Peter had given him a Western education, had him taught German and French, history and geography, but he did not take to it very well. A German wife (sister to the Emperor Karl VI’s wife) did not help either, as Aleksei treated her with coldness and contempt and found a mistress among his servants. Aleksei was lazy, uninterested in learning, politics, or warfare and preferred drinking with his circle of servants and clergy. Stefan Iavorskii began to see him as a future advocate of church interests, perhaps wrongly, but he let his views be known. Relations between father and son worsened, and the existence of Peter’s second wife Catherine meant that other heirs to the throne might be born. Finally, in 1715, both Catherine and Aleksei’s wife gave birth to sons almost simultaneously. There were now two possible heirs if Peter chose to bypass his eldest son. The tsar wrote to Aleksei chiding him for his indifference to the qualities needed for a future ruler, and Aleksei responded by offering to enter a monastery. Peter gave him another warning, and then went off to Western Europe to look after the continuing war and to do more traveling, this time to France.
While Peter was away a crisis arose in the supply of the Russian army in Finland, and the Senate, with its aristocratic supporters, dragged their feet. Peter was furious and sent order after order, but nothing happened. Menshikov stepped in to commandeer ships and send the supplies, thus instantly restoring himself to favor. His crimes were forgiven. A few weeks later, Aleksei Petrovich, the heir to the Russian throne, disappeared from Petersburg. For several weeks, no one knew where he was. Finally Peter’s emissaries found him in Vienna, where he had gone to take refuge with Emperor Karl, Aleksei’s brother-in-law, a man seriously unhappy with Peter’s rise to power and his potential influence in Germany. The Emperor gave him shelter, and Aleksei proposed to Karl’s ministers that he be given an army to overthrow his father. This was a tall order, and the Austrians feared Peter’s reaction, so they hid the tsarevich, first in the Tirol and then in Naples. There Peter sent one of his diplomats, Peter Tolstoi, to bring him back, and Tolstoi succeeded, in the process laying the foundation of the fortunes of the Tolstoi family for two centuries.
Aleksei returned to Moscow in January 1718. Thus began a long interrogation during which the extent of Aleksei’s support among the aristocracy and church became evident, not least because the tsarevich himself informed on them all. His sympathizers included the other favorite, Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii, Stefan Iavorskii, and many great aristocrats. As far as Peter could tell, they had not planned anything specific, but they also had known of Aleksei’s flight to Vienna. Peter faced a dilemma: either he could punish them all in imitation of Ivan the Terrible, or he could minimize the whole affair by punishing a few and thus cover it up. With some persuasion from his wife, he chose the second alternative. A dozen or so persons of low rank were executed. Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii and others were exiled, and Aleksei brought before the assembled Senate, ministers, generals, and high clergy for trial. The laymen voted for the death penalty, with dozens of men named by Aleksei as his supporters signing the document. Before Peter made a final decision about execution, the tsarevich died, probably from the aftereffects of judicial torture, but no information that is reliable exists about the cause of death.
Be that as it may, Peter’s problem was solved. He decreed that henceforth the tsar could choose his successor at will. He then proceeded to implement the new form of government, the Colleges, and to place over the church a new institution, the Holy Synod, a committee of clergy and laymen with a lay “Ober-procuror” as its head. This structure came from Prokopovich’s reading of Swedish legislation for the Lutheran church, and was a sharp break with Orthodox tradition. In the new arrangement the tsar became the “protector” of the church, and in practice he appointed the members of the Synod. The church would no longer be able to play a role in politics and oppose his reforms.
The seven years from the death of Aleksei to the death of Peter himself in January 1725 saw the culmination of Peter’s reordering of government, culture, and his foreign policy. The end of the Swedish war was a great relief, but he did not rest on his laurels. He immediately set off to use the momentary political confusion in Iran to seize some of its northern provinces, a scheme abandoned after his death but revealing of Peter’s thinking. The motivations here were purely commercial: control of the silk-producing areas of Iran, greater access to the Iranian market, and further on to the markets of the Near East and India. Utterly impractical, the plans show the extent to which Peter wanted to graft commercial appendages onto his agrarian empire.
With the restoration of central government, Peter established a Table of Ranks to replace the old court and military ranks he had allowed to lapse. It established an equivalency of civilian and military ranks, and provided for ennoblement of plebeians whose talents allowed them to advance. As a framework for the Russian state administration it lasted until 1917. In the same years Peter also tried to reorganize Russian provincial administration, redrawing the large provinces into fifty small ones, with subdivisions and a separation of administration and the judiciary all based on a Swedish model. Russia, however, lacked the resources for such a system, and after Peter’s death the number of provinces was reduced to fourteen, with another crucial administrative layer below the provincial governors. All this tinkering did not solve the problem of ruling a vast state with limited resources.
Peter’s victories added a new element to the Russian state in the form of the Baltic provinces of Estland and Livonia. For the first time Russia had territories with a powerful local elite that was not Orthodox. The loss of their privileges and lands to Swedish absolutism had led many of the German nobility of the area to support Peter and when he finally pushed out the Swedes in 1710 he granted the nobility their old privileges, including local courts, diets, and control of the Lutheran church on their estates. Elected town government was restored in the hands of the urban German merchants. In the Ukrainian Hetmanate, Peter took a stronger hand, for he engineered the election of Ivan Skoropadskii to replace the pro-Swedish Mazepa in 1708, and then, on Skoropadskii’s death in 1722, abolished the office of hetman altogether. He left, however, the rest of the Hetmanate’s political and legal structure intact and it survived until the 1780s. Thus Russia had not only new territories and peoples, but distinct legal and local political systems in Livonia and the Ukrainian Hetmanate, both differing from the Russian structure. In both places traditional privileges and a system of local elections kept power and wealth in the hands of the local nobility, while the tsar appointed governors to exercise general supervision.
Peter’s intervention in the border provinces was limited. In the inner Russian provinces he proceeded with more new and reformed institutions. After 1718 he replaced the old Russian tax system and his own innumerable financial improvisations with a single tax, the “soul tax,” to be paid by all non-nobles, which also structured finance and social relations until the 1860s. Some of these measures lasted and some did not, but all of them meant that the Russian state now had its basic institutions, their powers and duties, spelled out in law for the first time. The laws were published and provided with elaborate prefaces giving out the rationale for each measure. The new system of government now looked formally more or less the same as that of the rest of Europe’s monarchies.
Along with the new form of government came a new culture. Peter did not suppress the old religious culture, he merely began to import a new one – the secular culture of co
ntemporary Europe. He sent hundreds of young noblemen abroad, encouraged and sometimes directed the translation and printing of European books – not great classics but the textbooks of history, architecture, mathematics, geography, and other subjects. In the last years of his life he sent his personal librarian abroad to recruit scientists for an academy of sciences to be established in St. Petersburg, instructing the librarian to particularly look for mathematicians and physical scientists. The project was on the point of realization when he died, but his wife and successor formally established the academy in his memory. The result was the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1725. Peter was not only interested in science and art, but he also wanted to Europeanize Russia’s social habits. In the european thought of the time, a cultivated and polished people were necessary for an orderly state. Thus in 1719, Peter decreed that the nobility was to change its forms of socializing. The all-male banquets of the old days were to end, and in their place the nobility were to hold a sort of open house (known as “assemblies”) on particular days, and invite their acquaintances including those of lesser rank. Amusements were to be cultivated – music, dancing, and card-playing – and most important, the assemblies must include women. Like so many of Peter’s cultural decrees, it required what had already come into fairly general practice, As the diplomats immediately realized, the assemblies were also a perfect point of exchange of information about politics and simply the news of the day.
Almost the last thing he did before he died was to order the translation of the German jurist and historian Samuel Puffendorf’s book, On the Duties of Man and the Citizen. A widely read popular account of the nature of the state, it founded government ultimately on natural law and a contract among men in the state of nature. Puffendorf also stressed the ruler’s duty to work for the general good, not just his own, and the citizen’s duty of obedience without any sort of rebellion. He thought natural law was the work of God, but otherwise he strictly separated the state and its laws from divine commands. For Peter this meant that the tsar was still the sovereign, but the character of his rule was based on natural and human law, not merely tradition and the ruler’s personal piety. Western political thought had entered Russia.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 12