Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  In diplomatic terms the Grand Embassy largely failed because of Moscow’s ignorance of current European politics and consequent poor timing. Efforts to buttress the anti-Ottoman alliance proved unavailing: Muscovy’s allies made peace with the Turks at the congress of Karlowitz in January 1699, a step that left Peter livid at Austrian and Venetian perfidy, ‘taking no more notice of him than a dog’. The embassy arrived too late to influence the Treaty of Ryswick of September 1697 ending the War of the League of Augsburg or the treaty between the Holy Roman Empire and France a month later. Still, Peter met several European counterparts, especially the military hero William of Orange (William III of England), Frederick III (elector of Brandenburg and soon to be king in Prussia), Emperor Leopold I, and Augustus II (elector of Saxony and newly elected king of Poland-Lithuania). Peter’s instant friendship with the flamboyant Augustus II, together with Moscow’s vigorous support of his election to the Polish throne, soon translated into an alliance aimed against Sweden. Moreover, the muddled Muscovite diplomacy showed that they must maintain permanent representation at the main European courts and provide longer training for those serving abroad. Dr Postnikov’s linguistic facility and European experience, for example, resulted in appointment to the Muscovite delegation to the congress of Karlowitz and ultimately side-tracked his medical career in favour of diplomatic service in France, where he died in about 1709.

  As regards recruitment of skilled manpower, intellectual and cultural broadening, the entire experience reaped manifold rewards and left vivid impressions. The host governments strove to impress the tirelessly inquisitive and shyly charming tsar. His portrait in armour was painted in Holland and England by Aert de Gelder and Godfrey Kneller. He saw all the local sights, from Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopic glasses and Fredrik Ruysch’s anatomical museum to Dresden’s famous Kunstkammer and Isaac Newton’s English mint, hospitals, botanical gardens, theatres, industrial enterprises, government and church institutions. The German polymath Gottfried von Leibniz failed to win an audience, but transmitted ambitious proposals through Lefort’s son. Peter observed mock naval engagements in Holland and England, spent much time in shipyards, drank prodigiously, and twice rammed other vessels while sailing an English yacht on the Thames. The versatile and extravagant Marquis of Carmarthen enthralled the tsar with his nautical innovations and helped obtain a monopoly on importing tobacco to Russia via financial machinations and the gift of the Royal Transport, the most modern experimental ship in the English navy. Furthermore, Carmarthen assisted in recruiting such English ‘experts’ as professor of mathematics Henry Farquharson, shipwrights Joseph Nye and John Deane, and engineer John Perry. All played crucial parts in building the new Russian navy.

  Peter’s learned advisers, Jacob Bruce and Peter Postnikov, visited educational, medical, and scientific institutions, bought many books, medicaments, and instruments, and hired several hundred specialists including some sixty military surgeons. The embassy led directly to the hiring of Dr Nikolaas Bidloo, a Dutch physician, and Dr Robert Erskine, a Scotsman educated in London and on the continent. Both spent the rest of their lives in Russia, became close friends of Peter, and advised him on matters medical, scientific, and cultural. A Fellow of the Royal Society, Erskine served as the first imperial physician and head of the entire professional medical faculty; in 1707 Bidloo founded the first permanent hospital and surgical school in Moscow, equipped with an anatomical theatre and a large botanical garden. In preparation for further Europeanizing changes, Peter granted a fifteen-year monopoly on book imports to the Dutch printer Jan van Thessing. The bustling cities and harbours, merchant marines and fleets, armies and industries of Europe and England reinforced his determination to pursue change. While in Vienna in July 1698 Peter aborted plans for lengthy visits to Venice and Rome when he learned of the Streltsy mutiny and attempted march on Moscow.

  Though quickly suppressed, the Streltsy mutiny afforded an ideal pretext to purge the despised ‘janissaries’ through ghastly tortures and massive public executions. Several victims were displayed outside Sofia’s convent cell. The Streltsy constituted the first sizeable Muscovite institution that the tsar abolished; others such as the boyar duma, the council of the realm, and the gosti (privileged merchants and state fiscal agents) were already in eclipse or simply not summoned by the militarily preoccupied sovereign. He also divorced Evdokiia by incarceration in a monastery. After supervising almost a thousand Streltsy interrogations and executions, three weeks later Peter left for Voronezh. There he laid the specially designed keel of the 58–gun Predestinatsiia, a harbinger of his soaring ambitions while he privately vowed to dissipate his own ‘dark cloud of doubt’.

  His southern nautical ambitions inspired two more sojourns at Voronezh in the spring of 1699, interrupted only by Lefort’s funeral in Moscow and the founding in March of the Order of the Apostle Andrew the First-Called, Muscovy’s first knightly order. After launching the Predestinatsiia on 27 April amid great fanfare Peter reached the Sea of Azov with fourteen ships of the line by early June. Later that summer the tsar’s squadron accompanied the 46–gun Krepost’ (Fortress) to the straits of Kerch demanding passage for his envoy to Constantinople.

  Peter soon refocused on the Baltic in anticipation of joining Denmark and Saxony to partition the sprawling Swedish Empire under its boy-king, Charles XII. The warrior-tsar’s levy of recruits in November 1699 raised 32,000 men termed ‘immortals’ and destined for lifetime service. The new century was celebrated on 1 January 1700 by official adoption of the Julian calendar and twenty-four-hour day amid cannon-salutes, fireworks, and festive decorations.

  Reforms for War

  Eager for action in October 1700 Peter, at the death-bed of Patriarch Adrian, called for educated clergy, military, civil servants, architects, and those who knew ‘the doctor’s healing art’. German-speaking advisers such as Heinrich van Huyssen and the Livonian adventurer Johann Reinhold von Patkul were aware of cameralist notions of promoting prosperity through enlightened administration and good order (‘Police’, a term lacking in the Russian vocabulary). Peter’s manifesto of April 1702 inviting foreigners—military officers, craftsmen, and merchants—to enter his service appeared in Patkul’s German translation and adumbrated an emerging reform programme:

  It has been Our foremost concern to govern Our lands in a manner that would bring home to Our subjects Our intention to ensure their welfare and increase. To this end We have endeavoured not only to promote trade, strengthen the internal security of the state and preserve it from all manner of dangers which might harm the common good, but also to institute good order [Polizei] and whatever else contributes to the improvement [Cultur] of a people in order that Our subjects may soon become fit to form all manner of associations and exercise various skills along with other Christian and civilized peoples.

  With an artisan’s eye and pragmatic mind, Peter envisioned the transformation of Russia into a great power, its state and society based on technology and an organization aimed at maximizing production. Its hallmarks would be a European-type army and navy (supported by heavy industry to produce arms), planned urban conglomerations after the model of St Petersburg, and large-scale public works, particularly canals linking the major waterways and productive centres into an integrated economic whole. Peter even commissioned Perry to oversee a canal connecting the Volga and the Don, an over-ambitious project not realized until the 1930s.

  To supply the armed forces with skilled native personnel, Peter began founding makeshift educational institutions. He put Farquharson and two English students in charge of the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (housed in the former quarters of a Streltsy regiment); its enrolments grew from 200 pupils in 1703 to over 500 by 1711. Farquharson assisted Leontii Magnitskii in compiling the encyclopaedic Arifmetika (1703), one of the first Russian books to use Arabic numerals, and fulfilled diverse duties. He copied out other textbooks for his students, wrote, translated, and edited scientific works, and supervised
thirty-eight translations by others. He surveyed the Petersburg to Moscow road, charted the Caspian Sea, and went to Voronezh in 1709 to observe the solar eclipse. Transferred with 305 pupils to the St Petersburg Naval Academy in 1715, he rose to brigadier rank in 1737 and left a library of 600 books (half from the Naval Academy) upon his death. An artillery school was set up in Moscow in 1701, its 180 pupils increasing to 300 within three years, but it led a precarious existence until transferred to St Petersburg with 74 pupils in 1719. Private schools and tutoring continued as usual. Allowed back in 1698, the Jesuits had a boarding-school with about thirty boys until the order was expelled again in 1719. A German gymnasium opened under the Lutheran pastor Ernst Glück with state assistance in 1705; with seven teachers and seventy-seven pupils in 1711, it taught Greek and Latin, modern languages (including Swedish), geography, ethics, politics, rhetoric, arithmetic, deportment, and riding. It closed in 1715.

  Little did Peter foresee that the apparently easy war against Sweden would burgeon into two decades of incessant campaigning over huge expanses of land and water between shifting coalitions of powers great and small. The Great Northern War (1700–21), so designated in retrospect, consumed the bulk of his life. His role as warrior-tsar was etched into the marrow of the Europeanizing empire and shaped virtually every institution and policy adopted over its tortuous course. The demands of long-term warfare, most notably during the first years, account for the peculiarly frenzied and economically wasteful character of the early Petrine reforms.

  If Peter blithely entered the conflict, he was shocked by Charles XII’s swift victory over Christian IV of Denmark and Augustus II’s failure to seize Riga. The Swedes’ decisive defeat of the Russian siege of Narva compelled the tsar to reconstitute and rearm the army almost overnight. Over the next eight years some 138,000 recruits were raised; the term rekrut began to be used in about 1705, one of some 3,500 foreign terms adopted in Petrine Russia. By the end of the reign twenty-one general and thirty-two partial levies conscripted over 300,000 men for the army and the fleet.

  The armed forces became the model for the Europeanized society that Peter doggedly pursued. Utilizing European norms and Muscovite traditions, ‘selfmaintenance’ first of all, he fitfully constructed an integrated force under uniform conditions of service, subject to discipline on hierarchical principles, the officer corps trained in military schools, and the whole managed by a centralized administration guided by written codes. The organization was constantly reshuffled as the ostensibly standing army and expensive fleet showed wanton ways of melting away (or rotting in the case of ships) from continuous mass desertion as well as shortfalls in recruitment and losses to disease and combat.

  Despite constant losses from accident, inferior workmanship, poor maintenance, and difficult harbours, the navy grew swiftly, with 34 ships of the line mounting between 46 and 96 cannon, 15 frigates, 4 prams, 10 snows, and almost 100 smaller vessels and galleys deploying 2,226 cannon with crews and troops totalling 28,000 men by 1724. Ship names reflected victories and territorial gains: Standart (banner or rallying-point), Kronshlot, Triumf, Derpt, Narva, Fligel′-de-Fam (Dutch Flying Fame). The first ship of the line launched in 1710 was called Vyborg, and Alexander Menshikov presented Peter with the Dutch-built frigate Sv. Samson (St Samson) in honour of the Poltava victory. Peter personally launched the 54–gun Poltava at St Petersburg on 15 June 1712, while the Hangö victory of 1714 was celebrated in 1719 by the huge 96–gun Gangut.

  Exceeding 174,000 men by 1711 and totalling almost 304,000 in 1725, the armed forces engulfed 90 per cent of the state budget in the former year and still 73 per cent in the latter, a time of peace. Service was essentially lifelong for officers and enlisted men alike. Military service enshrined the principle of merit as explicated in the Table of Ranks, the system of fourteen grades (thirteen in practice) applied to all three branches of state service—military, civil, and court. Military ranks enjoyed preference over civil, and all thirteen in the military conferred noble status as opposed to only the top eight in the civil service. Squabbles over precedence and place-seeking did not end, however; the concept of merit involved ambiguous notions of time in grade, individual achievement, education, and potential. Predictably, the great majority of officers came from noble backgrounds, and the two guards regiments constituted specially privileged preserves. An exception was Alexander Menshikov’s Ingermanlandskii Regiment, a unit close in status to the two guards regiments with the highest proportion of non-noble officers (18 of 56). Menshikov, longtime crony of the tsar and energetic soldier-administrator-entrepreneur, came from dubious origins and fabricated a fanciful noble genealogy. Unable to write more than his name, he was promoted to aristocratic rank (Peter obtained for him the honorific title of prince of the Holy Roman Empire) and busily accumulated immense wealth. Having already abolished the rank of boyar and aware that Russian noble titles were devalued by the practice of equal inheritance, Peter introduced two European titles, count and baron, but conferred them infrequently and only for meritorious service. Baron Peter Shafirov, for example, gained his title in 1710; Baron Andrei Osterman obtained his in 1721 for negotiating peace with Sweden.

  State service proved burdensome for nobles and their families, as Peter strove to ensure that military service take precedence over civil and that young noblemen fulfil their service obligations. When established in 1711, the Senate was ordered to hunt down and register noble boys as young as 10 so that they could be sent to school before beginning service at 15. Relatives were to denounce those in hiding; in 1722 such youths were outlawed as if bandits. But enforcing these prescriptions in distant provinces was problematical at best; towards the end of Peter’s reign, Ivan Pososhkov decried the ease with which provincial nobles evaded service and concealed fugitives. Efforts to recover deserters oscillated between blandishments and threats, neither achieving much success.

  The peasantry furnished the bulk of all recruits, whether for the armed forces, the ‘manufactories’, naval yards, or construction sites. They also provided most of the tax revenues. To guarantee the flow of revenue for the armed forces, the country was divided into huge provinces each of which was to support different regiments. Continual mobilization peaked in the Swedish invasion of 1708–9, by which time the central government had largely disintegrated. The country consisted of satrapies like Ingermanland presided over by Menshikov in St Petersburg; virtually all Peter’s energies focused on the showdown with Sweden.

  Prolonged war stimulated Muscovy’s fledgling industry, especially iron and copper production, and to replace Sweden as a major supplier. In 1700 six iron smelters produced around 2,000 tons; by 1710 seventeen provided over 5,000 tons annually, the total redoubling in 1720. By 1725 twenty-four ironworks, eight operated by Tula merchant Nikita Demidov in the Urals, produced more than 14,000 tons: half from Demidov’s plants, almost three-quarters from the Urals. The first silver mines began production at Nerchinsk in south-eastern Siberia. Most iron went to the armed forces as did the output of the other ninety or so manufactories founded in Petrine Russia. After 1715, however, Russian bar-iron and sailcloth became substantial exports. Nikita Demidov gained noble status and accumulated a huge fortune. Because Petrine statistics are so scanty, one cannot confidently assess costs or living standards. Agricultural prices may have more than doubled over 1701–30, whereas industrial employment reached 18,400 by 1725.

  Batic Expansion and Victory at Poltava

  The Northern War’s first years saw Peter and his generals gradually devise a strategy of nibbling away at Swedish dominion in the Baltic while Charles XII pursued Augustus II into Central Europe. Thus the Russians seized control of the Neva river by the spring of 1703, when the Peter and Paul Fortress was founded in the river’s delta, the centre for a new frontier town and naval base. Further westward a fortress-battery called Kronshlot was hastily erected near the island of Kotlin, where the harbour of Kronstadt would soon be built. Peter and Menshikov personally led a boat attack on two Swedish
warships at the mouth of the Neva in early May that brought Russia’s first naval victory, celebrated by a medal inscribed ‘The Unprecedented Has Happened’. Tsar and favourite were both made knights of the Order of Saint Andrew. In 1704 Dorpat and Narva fell to the Russians, as mounted forces ravaged Swedish Estland and Livland. Among the captives taken in Livland was a buxom young woman, Marta Skavronska, soon to become Russified as Catherine (Ekaterina Alekseevna). She enchanted Peter successively as mistress and common-law wife, confidante and soul-mate, empress and successor. Adept at calming his outbursts of rage, she matched his energy and bore him many children.

  Peter certainly needed emotional comfort during these years of constant travels to the northern and western fronts, periodic illnesses, and the frazzling turnabouts of coalition warfare and civil war. His own role in government mushroomed so quickly that a personal Kabinet (chancery) was founded around 1704 under Aleksei Makarov whose clerk’s rank soon evolved into cabinet secretary. While the Russians won localized victories in the north-west, exiled Streltsy suddenly seized Astrakhan in August 1705 and threatened to incite other Volga towns and the Don Cossacks. The rebels railed against shaving beards and wearing European clothing, endorsed the Old Belief, and massacred more than 300 persons and the local prefect. After Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev recaptured Astrakhan in March 1706, the Preobrazhenskii Bureau investigated more than 500 individuals (including 401 Streltsy), executed 314 of them, and banished the rest into hard labour. But tranquillity lasted barely a year: a similar outbreak led by the Don Cossack Kondratii Bulavin convulsed the lower Don in 1707–8—just as Charles XII invaded western Russia and Ukraine, where he was joined by Hetman Ivan Mazepa with a force of Ukrainian Cossacks. In the mean time Saxony had left the war, with Augustus II yielding the Polish throne to the Swedish-supported Stanislaus Leszczyńnski. Russia now faced Sweden alone.