Peter Essay

 

            Reformist, audacious, irreligious, tyrannical, great. There are indeed many widely varying adjectives which could be, and have been, used to describe one of the giants of Russian history, Peter Alexeyevich Romanov.  The many different ways in which the legacy of the Peter I was viewed by his contemporaries and the generations to follow and how this legacy has evolved reflects the many complex trends and problems which led up to Peter’s reforms and the consequences which resulted from them. In this essay I will demonstrate that though Peter’s policies did indeed mark a major, dramatic, and largely successful change in Russian government, society, culture, and outlook, it was neither a sudden unprecedented change, nor was it universally welcomed or decried. In order to place Peters’ achievements, and failures, into the wider context of the development of Russian history, I will look at the events and trends which preceded Peter, then I will provide an overview of Peter’s motivation, goals, and the dramatic changes which resulted from them, and finally I will evaluate how Peter was viewed by his contemporaries (nobles, priests, peasants, etc.) and how these judgments were changed overtime by Peters’ successors.

            If one were to simply compare Russian society, culture, and politics when Peters took sole possession of the throne in 1696 with Russia upon Peter I’s death in 1725 it is easy to conclude that Peter’s mission of modernization was a complete departure from the past. However, upon closer inspection of the policies and trends which preceded Peter’s grand tour of Western Europe, especially those of Michael and Aleksei Romonov, we can see Russia had long been moving toward secularization, centralization, and even westernization. The series events and circumstances which allowed Peter to create such sweeping and dramatic changes from Muscovite Russia to Imperial Russia is because these changes had already began to take shape in the Muscovite state beginning in the 16^th century. Despite Englishman Files Fletcher’s impression of the Russian government as being “plain Tyrannical”, the position of Tsar under Ivan IV was far less powerful and far more pliable to the wishes of the nobility and clergy than the erratic actions of Ivan would have suggested. Even before the Time of Troubles, Ivan IV in his yearly years gathered together the zemskii sobor in order to gather opinion and begin a process of centralizing the monarchy. Ivan updated the law code, created local regions; he standardized military obligations and created the more modern and European streltsy units. Despite the turmoil and destruction of the Time of Troubles following further strides toward centralization, especially among Boiars, was achieved in the form a national patriotic army under Prince Pozharskii which began to express a sense of Russian national identity. Then in 1613 a zemskii sobor met in

Moscow representing all the free classes in Russia met and decided upon the first Romonov Tsar Michael, Peter’s grandfather and in this way created major breaks from the traditions of the old Kievan Rus. These developments facilitated and set the foundation for the centralization and secularization of Michael, Aleksei, and of course Peter. The Time of Troubles moved the Russian nobility and landed elite to accept

and indeed encourage autocracy and centralization precisely to avoid the anarchy and boiar conflicts that fueled the Time of Troubles. Under Tsar Michael the development and organization of a more professional army, along with increases in taxation and to some extent governance of the countryside, further moved toward subordination and organization of all facets of Russian life under a centralized state. In addition Michael

brought in Dutch experts to build a modern weapons factory, a move which clearly contradicts the idea that it was only under Peter that westernization and learning from the west began. Under Michael’s son Aleksei, more major strides toward centralization and expansion of autocratic power largely attributed to Peter alone. However, from the

outset of his reign Aleksei faced a major rebellion in the form of the “Moscow Uprisings”. Giving into pressures from the violent rebellion Aleksei gave into demands for the resignation of his advisors. This show of pliability led to further demands from the middle service nobility, which culminated in the Ulozhenie of 1649. This law which at last utterly enserfed the Russian peasantry, who have long seen their freedoms

deteriorate, marked a turning point for both the creation of a centralized autocracy under Peter and a change in the nature of the elite. In exchange for a guarantee of their noble status and near total control of their peasants, the nobility bound itself to service to the state. Under Aleksei the move toward autocracy and bureaucracy continued as he reduced the collective power of the boiars by expanding the Duma, making the various facets of the bureaucracy more obedient, regular, and impersonal. All of these trends would become hallmarks of Peter’s policies and reforms. Michael also created European style grammar schools in Moscow based on the model of the Kiev Academy, bringing secular learning to Russia which would be greatly expanded by Peter. Finally, it must be noted that secularization of the Orthodox Church also began before Peter’s final subordination of the church to the state. Independent of the secularization under the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe, the Orthodox Church took a much more secular approach to religion. Monastic life and miracles were deemphasized while practical solutions and good deeds were promoted. The schism between new ceremonial practices advanced by Patriarch Nikon and the older conservative clergy led to the driving out of many of the more conservative clergy and the advancement of secular ideals and a weakening of patriarchal influence and power.

        It must seem clear now that Peter was not a complete anomaly, a sweeping reformer who was a complete aberration from the decentralized, backward, eastern autocracy. In fact Peter’s centralization, westernization secularization, and enhancement of the state and autocracy were very much in line with the trends developed under his predecessors. However, this by no means undercuts the fact that Peter’s reforms were sweeping, radical, audacious, and perhaps even over ambitious. For the sheer force of Peter’s character and his impatience to make Russia a great European power created a clear and undeniable desire of revolutionary changes. Before analyzing the effects and judgments of Peter’s reforms and achievements by his contemporaries and successors, we must first examine the motivations behind and the nature of Peter’s military, political, religious, and cultural reforms. Whatever the causes or consequences of Peter’s reforms may be the chief motivation behind Peter’s massive efforts to drag Russia into the imperial era is that he wanted Russia to become a modern, powerful, and equal member of Europe. After returning to Russia from Europe and crushing the streltsy uprising in 1698, Peter moved full steam ahead to change Russia from the ground up. But first he wanted to change the very appearance of Russian society and Russians on a cosmetic level. In 1700 Peter changed Russia to the Western European Julian calendar and like Caesar Augustus himself adopted the name imperator or “victorious general”. He wanted to change, whether they liked it or not, the “backward” appearance of the Russian nobility, forcing them to shave their faces and wear German styles, for both men and women. This included the low cut dresses for noble women fashionable in Western Europe. Along with their clothes Peter took away their tradition bound exclusion from Russian society and forced them into public with balls and public gatherings, the extent to which Peter succeeded is debatable as we shall see. No other cosmetic addition that Peter made to the Russian landscape was as ambitious as his “Window on the West” St. Petersburg. Created through sheer and costly military conquest in the Great Northern Wars, built from the sweat of peasants, and created to physically westernize Russia in the cities European layout and architecture. St. Petersburg in many ways embodied everything Peter wanted Russia to be, western, strong, and united under the state.

When Peter set out to see Western Europe, his chief goal was to learn how to make Russia a respected and modern military power. Peter wanted Russia to be a great naval power like British and the Dutch. Standing in his way were ports on the Baltic and the Black sea held by the Ottoman Empire and Sweden’s Charles XII, a competent monarch equal to the likes of Peter. By taking the title imperator Peter wanted the legitimacy of his state and his radical reforms to be military power and wealth. To this end Peter began the Great Northern War against Sweden (1699-1721). Despite early defeat at the Battle of Narva Peter persisted and the drive to defeat the dominant Northeastern power drove Peter to quickly accelerate the earlier efforts of his father to modernize the Russian military. He created to the ire of some of the nobility, to have the entire officer core made up of nobles who served for life, along with a mass conscription of Russian peasants to create a standing army which also served for life. He standardized the army formalizing training and tactics. He created ordered ranks and hierarchies for the navy and army based on the model of German states such as Prussia. Disregarding any objections to his impatient push to make Russia a European power, Peter drove up taxes, conscripted solders, expanded the munitions industry, and even melted down church bells to make canons. In 1721, after successful military campaigns, Peter forced the Swedes to sign the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 receiving a large opening to the Baltic Sea. There can no doubt, that despite it’s massive costs, Peter was successful in bringing Russia to the full attention of the great European powers and in this way mold their conception and judgment of Peter himself.

Aside from his many and often costly wars of expansion, army and navy building, Peter also worked to modernize Russian government. Influenced by Europe and specifically the German states and ideas such as cameralism, Peter quickly created a Senate which became a permanent body of administration where a Procurator-General represented Peter, while in 1720 a system of ministerial colleges based on the model of Charles XII’s Swedish bureaucracy was created made up of 11 colleges governing different aspects of the state. Peter also created a Supreme Pricy council to replace the Boiar Duma.  He divided the Russian administration into fifty guberniia or provinces.  Town government was also standardized, however, as I will discuss these ministries generally did not work as Peter intended. One of Peter’s most famous changes was the creation of n intricate table of ranks for the nobility in both military and civil administration in an effort to create a “universal service state” to subordinate nobles to the state and bind them to service just as the Ulozhenie of 1649 had bound Russian peasants to their lands. To this end Peter decreed in 1714 that all noble children are to be educated and that, “no one is allowed to marry unless he learns these subjects”. Primogeniture was instituted by Peter. Peter also promoted cultural secularization with the introduction of Russia’s first newspaper the Vedomosti. Peter also promoted translating Classical and European texts into Russian and created a new secular script.  Aside from education, Peter intervened to massively increase industrial output through serf staffed factories and promoted the growth of cash crops for export. To this end people also made towns and mirs much more hierarchal based on poll taxes laws. Peter also moved to secularize the church and make it subordinate to the state in the fashion of the Pagan Roman imperators. Peter also directly strengthened the power of the Tsar by insisting that the Tsar would name his successor, a decree which he himself never carried out. A new Patriarch was not appointed by Peter, who instead created a Holy Synod who presided over religious matters. Peter’s appointed exarch Feofan Prokopuvich called the church to stay out of state matters and focus on spiritual matters only. Peter abandoned most of the spiritual ceremonies performed traditionally by the Tsar, making the church a tool of the state.  This massive list of reforms however, as we shall see, had both mixed consequences and elicited mixed reactions from the populace.

            Peter’s reforms were sweeping, audacious, daring, and often uncompromising. The sheer speed and ferocity with which Peter pushed Russia’s previously slow strides toward centralization and autocratic hierarchy forward did not come without limitations, negative consequences and conservative reactions to his policies from all levels of Russian society. Though Peter is praised by his successors and enlightenment European observers as bringing light and the rule of law to a government that was in the western imagination “plain tyrannical” and “barbarous”. However, Peter’s policies increased rigid hierarchy and autocratic powers which his predecessors had begun. Political participation was greatly decreased as nobles became, in theory, bound servants of the state, while from the towns to the country side hierarchies were simplified, as the entire non-noble labor population came under the poll tax laws and were all subject to conscription. Though in principle to the table of ranks created a meritocracy and social mobility, the system heavily favored nobles who advanced quickly in the bureaucracy and military, while other rarely went very far. The church who was once an important political actor was subordinated as a tool of the state with the position of Patriarch replaced by the Holy Synod cementing the power of the Tsar and state over the church. Hence in this way Peter’s system created more defined hierarchy and autocracy. The Table of Ranks also did not function as it was intended and required changes for years to come. The Table was very much manipulated by the middle service nobility and upper noble families to their advantage. The extent to which Peter’s system of colleges and provincial offices immediately enhanced the efficiency of the Russian state is also arguable. Most of these institutions were understaffed, the countryside was still largely ungoverned and little funding was given to Peter’s many new institutions and offices. Peter’s policy hardly produced a perfectly run and efficient machine of bureaucracy. The group most affected by the “Petrine Revolution” is no doubt the nobility. Within a generation they were forced to give up their traditional fashions, move into a new city built on a swamp, noble women forced to go into public life among men, and being coerced into education. Beyond the changes on the cosmetic level, which were largely eventually adopted by the nobility, greater changes occurred under the enactment of the Table of Ranks and the binding of the nobility to obligatory and often lifetime service. Though, as I mentioned, the upper nobility stilled enjoyed widespread privilege and favoritism in the ranks of the military and bureaucracy, and highest noble families manipulated the table of ranks to their advantage it still produced dissatisfied backlash from the nobles who felt such obligatory service to be a burden. Thus it was that with the ascension of the Anna that some of the nobility, led by the Supreme Privy Council pushed for and was partly successful in scaling back some of Peter’s demands such as scaling back time limit of service and nobles being able to enroll in officer academies. Thus it is evident that the nobility still retained a large amount of influence, power, and that the state now depends on them as much as they depend on the state. Despite Peter’s willfulness the nobility was far from completely subordinate to the state. Peter’s social and cultural reforms created difficulty for many noblewomen were untrained for the life of Western European aristocracy, such as when one visiting Prussian officer noted that men and women were seated separately. The education of young Russians nobles, who were often forced to attend school, was often completely western. As a result many Russian nobles slowly became more disconnected from the general populace and some did not even speak much Russian.

The subordination of the Orthodox Church, just as it had begun gather widespread influence after the Time of Troubles, was far more complete than that of the nobility, but here too there was resistance and intense criticism of Peter’s move to control the clergy. Though Peter was a religious man, he was far more concerned with consolidating the supremacy of the state and autocracy. The replacement of the Patriarch with a like minded exarch in the Ukranian Prokopovich, who worked tirelessly to conform all facets of Russian society to Peter’s policies and the creation of Holy Synod effectively brought the church under control and it would never again regain the influence it had under the early Muscovite state. However, there was significant resistance to Peter’s policies. Peter’s, highly symbolic, melting of church bells to forge canons and parading about the streets with his “Most drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters” was not only offensive to the clergy but to the Russian population as a whole. Before his death the Patriarch Adrian attempted to replace Peter and bring back Sofia to no avail.  But the church’s resistance and even hatred of Peter, even going as far as to call him the “antichrist”, was clear in that even Peter’s first appointed Ukranian exarch was opposed to Peter. The church remained somewhat defiant even later into Peter’s reign as the Church withdrew its support for monastery schools ordered to be set up by Peter in 1722.

 As earth shattering as Peter’s policies are often seen to be, and they did create great changes, and difficulties, for the upper crust of society, the countryside was largely unaffected by Peter’s reforms. The life of the average Russian serf still moved to the pace of the seasons and attempting to survive a harsh and subsistence level life. Power in Russia remained in the hands of a small minority. Peter’s attempts to intervene in agricultural production, harvesting techniques, and even rural administration largely went undone and little affected the vast Russian countryside. Law was largely administered by the estates themselves and the countryside still teamed with bandits and steppe raiders. If anything Peter’s policies further burdened the peasantry. Peter’s rigorous taxation to fund his war did increase the efficiency with which the peasants and more immediately, the town’s people were taxed. Taxes steadily increased as Peter involved in one war of expansion after another in the name of the state. The Russian serfs were conscripted into Russia’s large standing army for life, as were the townsmen. Many were brought to St. Petersburg to build Peter’s grand vision of an Imperial Russia, a large number of whom would die. Finally, Peter allowed the use and buying of entire villages to work in new factories and enterprises sprouting up across Russian cities. Peasants who were used to working on the land were extremely unhappy with the tedious indoors work, nonexistent pay, and harsh treatment. Prints and satires, such as that depicting Peter as a cat, showed the negative reaction of the peasantry to Peter’s so called modernizing reforms.

As we have seen Peter’s policies were not the great and positive strides away toward modernity and away from tyranny which was so popular among European observers. Neither did many of Peter’s policies result a dramatic turn toward efficiency and in fact many of them did not work as Peter intended and had to be reconfigured by his successors. However, it cannot be denied either by his contemporaries, successors, or foreigners that Peter, for better or worse brought massive changes to Russia and set the ground work for a new Imperial Russian state. The army and navy Peter created was indeed a modern and powerful force. Peter’s wars, costly as they war, made Russian a great and respected European power alongside the likes of France and Prussia. Through military victory the power of Peter’s imperial state was legitimized. Peter successfully created an impersonal and service oriented bureaucracy staffed by service nobility which his father and grandfather had hoped to create. The basic, though understaffed framework of Peter’s government survived on long after him and allowed the Russian to become increasingly centralized, efficient, and most of all stable. Peter’s vision for a new Russia would largely be realized if not by himself, which his untimely death attributed to, then by his predecessors. The colleges and systems of local administration became increasingly staffed with more and more capable men educated in Peter’s schools. Peter’s focus on education and obsession with new knowledge from Europe, paved the way from the coming of the enlightenment under Catherine II and the rise of the intelligentsia. Though the nobles stilled retained their power, they were largely successfully indoctrinated into service for the state. In fact, many nobles, even in Peter’s time welcomed the table of ranks as a simplification and solidification of hierarchy and privilege. Though nobles were by no means much more docile in their push for power and influence, their call be free of the burdens of service under Catherine the Great, would be based on enlightenment and European ideas first brought into Russia by Peter. Peter’s goal of secularizing the Russian state and subordinating the clergy was very successful as the church never regained its former influence. This came about both with the secularizing trends in the church before Peter’s arrival and the help of like minded clergy such as Feofan Prokopovich. Finally, as the state prospered and the rule of law improved in the countryside Peter’s reputation among the general populace also improved, which in turn may have led to our generally positive impression of Peter today. The improvement of Peter’s image can be attributed to his successors who looked to him as a source of inspiration, as well as legitimacy. Catherine I, though abandoning some of the understaffed offices created by Peter, largely worked to continue Peters work in all aspects of government. Then, although Peter II and Anna both gave in to certain noble pressures, moving the capital back to Moscow and allowing more noble freedom, they ultimately did not greatly change or derivate from Peter’s policies and institutions.  Elizabeth, who came to the throne in 1741 after a bloodless coupe in which she ousted the infant Ivan IV and the hated German advisors she had, needed  to legitimize and establish herself. To this end she became Peter I’s greatest advocate and promoter. She successfully created a, what came to be widely accepted portrait, of Peter as the greatest of the Russian Tsars and herself as his rightful Romonov heiress. Though Peter’s legacy and westernization continued to be questioned by those, such as the slavophiles, who idealized the Muscovite Orthodox past, Elizabeth’s promotion and positive foreign impressions of Peter created a lasting popular image of Peter the Great.

Though Peter I’s great is often portrayed as the singular powerful and positive force which brought Russia out of darkness and into the light of European civilization, the reality of Peter’s legacy is much more complicated. The relative ease with which Peter’s policies were the direct result of historical trends already developed before Peter’s ascension to power. Peters’ policy themselves were in fact far more controversial and far less unquestionably positive or successful. However, Peter is beyond a doubt an extremely important figure who set the ground work for Russia’s rise as a great power and an Imperial state for the next two centuries.