Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917

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His emphasis on worldly greatness and achievement did not mean that Peter was not a believer, but it did decouple the secular power from its partnership with the church. He abolished the Patriarchate and subordinated the church to himself by creating the Holy Synod with his own appointed Over-Procurator as head of it. He appropriated to himself part of the dignity previously accorded to the Patriarch: at the Poltava entry he was greeted with the words formerly reserved for the Patriarch: ‘Blessed be He who cometh in the name of the Lord!’

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In his concept, the state stood above selfish or partial interests, above ethnic or religious distinctions, above even the person of the monarch himself. Peter was the first Russian monarch to attempt to draw a distinction between the state on the one hand and the person and property of the ruler on the other. This distinction was implicit in the new oath recruits had to take when entering the army, to ‘the Sovereign and the State’ (gosudariu i gosudarstvu). He did not always observe the distinction himself, still less did his subordinates, but all the same the first move had been made away from the patrimonial system of rule towards a functional or bureaucratic one, where the public and private spheres are demarcated from one another and each branch of government has a function independent of the personal interests of those discharging the office. Peter even tried to eliminate biology and kinship from the monarchy by challenging the customary order of succession, and stipulating that each ruler should nominate his or her own successor.

Establishing the principles of functionalism and impartiality was the motive for the introduction of ‘colleges’ in 1718 in place of prikazy or ‘offices’. Colleges were functional rather than personal or territorial: each college had its own defined sphere of jurisdiction, be it the army, justice or tax-collecting. Furthermore, each one was headed not by a single individual, but by an administrative board of several persons, to underline the principle that its authority was not to be used to further the interests of any individual or family. As Peter explained in his ukaz of 19 December 1718: ‘The colleges have been instituted because they are an assembly of many persons, in which the presidents do not have so much power as the old magistrates (heads of the prikazy), who did as they liked. In the colleges the president may not undertake anything without the consent of his colleagues.’

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But of course colleges can generate their own inbred loyalties, of the kind evoked by the Russian proverb ‘one hand washes another’: bodies of men as well as individuals are capable of generating their own interests and defending them so stubbornly as to clog the best-designed mechanism. For that reason, the colleges had to accept another of Peter’s principles, that the eye of the sovereign should be everywhere. If the state was a mechanism, then it required an operator, who would have a comprehensive overview of its working, and intervene to correct any malfunctioning. So he placed in each college a personal representative, the fiskal, ‘who should watch that all business is conducted zealously and equitably; and should anyone fail to do so, then the fiskal should report on all this to the College, as the instruction commands him’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Since Peter desired vigilance at all costs, he absolved fiskaly in advance of the charge of making false accusations, and in practice often awarded them part of the property of those they denounced. In this way he opened the road to a cult of exhaustive paperwork and malicious denunciations which was to become part of the texture of Russian bureaucratic life.

Peter’s governmental reforms thus betrayed a fateful ambivalence. On the one hand they were imbued with a spirit of thrusting confidence in the capacity of human beings to accomplish far-reaching and beneficial change through rational organization. On the other hand, this confidence was clouded by the perpetual suspicion that, left to themselves, human beings would not actually behave in a rational fashion, but would obstruct the most perfectly designed mechanism through idleness, clumsiness, ignorance, egoism or the pursuit of clannish and partial interests. Peter’s letters and instructions are replete with the anxious desire to impose his will on everyone at all times, even in the most trivial of matters, as if he were dimly conscious that reprobate human nature would frustrate his impeccably conceived schemes. He even forbade spitting and swearing by officials in colleges, and laid down punishments for persistent transgressors: ‘as violators of good order and general peace, and as adversaries and enemies of His Majesty’s will and institutions, they are to be punished on the body and by deprivation of estates and honour’.

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At bottom, this was his tacit recognition that the principles of secular, active government, based on strict subordination, impersonality, division of functions and formal regulations, were quite alien to the principles pertaining in kinship systems such as had hitherto pervaded Russian society from the village community right up to the court: informality, personalization, mutual responsibility, ‘One hand washes the other’.

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The social class which was to be the bearer of his new ideals of state was the nobility (shliakhetstvo), amalgamated for the purpose out of the previous courtly and service estates. Peter wanted the shliakhetstvo to be a social category defined not by birth and inherited hierarchy, but by personal merit and distinction in the service of the state: ‘We will allow no rank to anyone until they have rendered service to us and the fatherland’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He put the concept into practice by requiring that young nobles should be trained in a skill useful to the state, should present themselves for examination in it, and should then enter service at the lowest rank. In the case of the army, this meant sons of aristocratic pedigree signing on as privates, though to soften the blow to family pride they were permitted to do so in one of the prestigious new Guards regiments, evolved from Peter’s ‘play* troops. At the height of his reforming zeal, Peter even tried to insist that no nobleman without a certificate of competence in mathematics and geometry could even be allowed to marry – a draconian stipulation he later had to drop.

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The ideal of promotion through personal service was formalized in the Table of Ranks, instituted in 1722. It supplanted the system of mestnichestoo, abolished thirty years earlier but never replaced, under which official posts had been distributed according to the inherited family standing of the aspirant. The new Table was based on the military hierarchy, but applied not only to the army and navy, but also to the civil service and the court. It contained fourteen parallel ranks: by working up from the fourteenth to the eighth, a non-noble could win noble status, not just for himself but for his descendants, who were ‘to be considered equal in dignity and benefits to the best ancient dvorianstvo, even though they be of base lineage and were never previously promoted by the Crown to the noble status or furnished with a coat of arms.’

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There was of course a tacit contradiction here, reflecting Peter’s chronic dualism over whether to coerce his subordinates or awaken their pride in service. In principle, a commoner became a noble only by merit, but, having once made the grade, he transmitted his standing to his heirs, who consequently did not have to jump through the same hoops. While Peter reigned, the sheer force of his personality ensured that nobles did what was required of them, but his successors were less punctilious and allowed the element of compulsion to wane. The long-term effect of Peter’s reform, therefore, was to create a new hereditary privileged social estate.

He accepted the logic of this implication from the outset, and tried to buttress nobles’ material capacity to perform state service hereditarily by introducing the system of ‘entail’, as practised in Britain, under which a landed estate would pass in its entirety to one heir, usually male. The intention was to prevent landed properties becoming subdivided until they were no longer able to provide a sufficient living for a nobleman, and also to compel non-inheritors to earn both their livelihood and noble status by entering the civil or military service.

(#litres_trial_promo) In this matter, however, he was unable to overcome the deeply rooted kinship obligation to provide for all one’s heirs. After his death the law on entail was repealed: nobles continued, like peasants, to subdivide their holdings.

THE NEW CAPITAL CITY What Peter intended for his servitors was not just a revamped framework for service, but a whole new way of life and culture, of the kind he had observed during his travels. He laid out an exemplar of it in his new city of St Petersburg, constructed on marshy terrain freshly conquered from the Swedes at the easternmost extremity of the Baltic Sea. The city began life as a fortress and a base for the newly created Baltic Fleet, and it remained a demonstration that Russia was now a great naval power, more than a match for Sweden. But from the outset Peter cherished even more exalted ambitions for it St Petersburg was to be a prototype of the ‘regular’ Russia with which he wished to replace chaotic, rambling and nepotistic Muscovy. He referred to it as his paradis-using a Latinate word rather than the Russian rai.

This was no ‘Third Rome’, but a ‘New Amsterdam’. Foreign architects were invited to submit plans for public buildings and standard designs to be used for the homes of his courtiers. Gradually it became a real capital city, constructed in stone and laid out on a generous scale, affording spacious views of sky and water. Or, as an inhabitant of more than two centuries later, Joseph Brodsky, put it, ‘Untouched till then by European styles, Russia opened the sluices, and baroque and classicism gushed into and inundated the streets and embankments of St Petersburg. Organ-like forests of columns sprang high and lined up on the palatial facades ad infinitum in their miles-long Euclidean triumph.’

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All this could not be accomplished without terrible cost. For years St Petersburg was nothing but a vast building site in a swamp. Conscript labourers were brought in from all over the country to flounder in the mud with their shovels and wheelbarrows and often to lose their lives in it as well, through negligence, overwork or as a result of one of the floods which regularly swept through the location until the River Neva could be contained in embankments of stone. A century later, the historian Nikolai Karamzin, an admirer of Peter and his works, nevertheless conceded that the city was ‘built on tears and corpses’.

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By 1713, however, St Petersburg had taken shape sufficiently for Peter to move the court and the principal government buildings to it, and he began to insist that within a certain time nobles who wished to present themselves at court must build themselves a residence there, employing one of the standard architectural designs he had commissioned. To economize on scarce stone, he stipulated that aristocratic town houses should be erected contiguous to one another, in terraces along the embankments of the rivers and canals. New residents, as they moved in, were presented with small sailing boats for their use, and were commanded on pain of fines to parade in them on the water every Sunday afternoon to perform exercises and demonstrate their navigational skill.

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One major symbolic change compared with Moscow: foreigners were no longer confined to the outskirts, but were allowed, indeed encouraged, to live within the city. Merchants dealing in foreign trade were required to re-route their business away from (usually) Arkhangel’sk and the White Sea to St Petersburg and the Baltic. The new capital was to become a ‘window on Europe’ in the commercial sense too.

St Petersburg, by its location and its appearance, was living proof that a new Russia, a European great power, had a palpable existence, and one moreover oriented towards future achievements. A century later an acute French observer, the Marquis de Custine, observed that ‘the magnificence and immensity of St Petersburg are tokens set up by the Russians to honour their future power, and the hope that inspired such efforts strikes me as sublime’.

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But it was so different from any other Russian city, such an affront to their easygoing, semi-rural rambling streets and dwellings, that it has always retained an aura of unreality. Dostoevskii called it ‘an invented city’ and loved to evoke it in the ghostly light of the northern summer as a dreamlike setting in which his characters play out their spiritual dramas.

Prince Odoevskii, assiduous collector of folktales, cited a Finnish legend which well captured St Petersburg’s origins and its insubstantial quality. The workmen building the city found that whenever they laid a stone it was sucked into the marsh. They piled stone on stone, rock on rock, timber on timber, but it made no difference: the swamp swallowed them all up, and only the mud remained. At length Peter, who was absorbed in building a ship, looked round and saw that there was no city. ‘You don’t know how to do anything,’ he said to his people, and thereupon began to lift rock after rock, shaping each one in the air. When in this manner the whole city was built, he let it gently down on to the ground, and this time it stood without disappearing into the mud.

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Whether or not de Custine knew of this legend, he tempered his admiration for the city with analogous apprehensions: ‘Should this capital, rooted neither in history nor in the soil, be forgotten by the sovereign for a single day; or should some change in policy carry the master’s thoughts elsewhere, the granite hidden beneath the water would crumble, the flooded lowlands return to their natural state and the rightful owners of this solitude would regain possession of their home.’

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The new capital city became the forum for a new elite secular culture. Flowing Russian robes were replaced by the tight-fitting jackets and breeches current in most of Europe. A ‘decree on assemblies’ required nobles to gather regularly at soirées, balls and salons where they could meet each other, discuss business, learn what was going on in the world, and generally cultivate the social graces expounded in Peter’s primer on etiquette, An Honourable Mirror to Youth, or an Instruction for Social Intercourse, drawn from Divers Authors. This manual, translated from the German, and much of it drawn originally from Erasmus, enjoined its readers ‘not to snuffle at table’, ‘not to blow one’s nose like a trumpet’ and ‘not to slobber over one’s food or to scratch one’s head’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Women were expected to take a full part in these ‘assemblies’, in contrast to the seclusion imposed upon them previously. An official newspaper was issued, to announce and record the main social occasions, and to keep the public up to date with diplomatic, commercial and other news.

EDUCATION AND CULTURE In his attitude to education and culture, Peter was at first strictly utilitarian: he set up schools which could train his young nobles in the skills required by the state. Hence the so-called ‘cipher schools’, which taught mathematics, navigation and other arts useful to future civil servants, army and naval officers. They were not always successful at attracting and holding their pupils, even when backed by Peter’s compulsion, and towards the end of his life, he felt the need to integrate them into a more general educational framework, which would give science and technology a secure place in Russian society. At this time the only higher educational institutions were the Slav-Greek-Latin Academies in Moscow and Kiev, which provided for the needs of the church, their curriculum based partly on Byzantine tradition and partly on the Jesuit Counter-Reformation learning of the seventeenth century.

Peter’s aspiration to give science and technology a special place in Russian society originated in his correspondence with Leibniz, which began in 1697. Leibniz, who had grand schemes for the spread of civilization, learning and technology throughout the world, was delighted to number the Emperor of Russia among his adherents. He recommended that Peter should appoint foreigners able to disseminate good learning in Russia, and at the same time should establish schools, libraries, museums, botanical and zoological gardens able to collect knowledge in all its forms and make it available to Russians. He also advised that Russia should have its own research institutes, to investigate the country’s immense and largely uncharted resources and to propose ways of improving and developing the national economy.

Peter implemented much of this programme. He opened Russia’s first museum (the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg), directed the purchasing of books for the first public library, sponsored expeditions to little-known regions to look for minerals, survey natural resources and make maps. In his later years he laid the foundation for a national Academy of Sciences on the model of the Royal Society in London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris, both of which he had visited. To set up such an institution in Russia was not an easy task, for there were no native scholars with whom to staff it. Several advisers, including Christian Wolff, from the University of Halle, warned him that to found an Academy without a supporting network of lower educational institutions was to put the cart before the horse in no uncertain fashion.

Peter, who had already, as it were, built a capital city in mid-air and then lowered it to the ground, was not likely to falter before such advice. He was dissatisfied with his earlier schemes for introducing Western learning in Russia, and he decided, as so often in his career, to break the logjam from the very top. The draft plan which he approved in 1724 made provision for the Academy to be combined with a university, to teach the new knowledge generated therein, and even for a Gymnasium, to prepare suitable students for the university. It duly opened in this form shortly after his death.

The result of his efforts was that Russia did indeed receive science and learning at the highest international levels, as something sponsored by the state and connected with the empire’s ambition to be in all ways a leading player among the powers of Europe. Science and learning from the outset had the highest prestige and priority in state expenditure.

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But there was a price to be paid for vaulting most of the normal stages in building up a scientific community. Nearly all Russia’s early scientists were foreign – a good many of them German – and the suspicion came to be widely entertained that science was something alien to the life of the ordinary people. Since moreover it had been launched at the same time as the church was being restricted, learning had the air of being godless, perhaps even the work of the Antichrist.

A biography in the spirit of Peter was that of Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), perhaps the first outstanding native Russian scholar. He came from the far northern Arkhangel’sk region, where serfdom was absent and where the Old Belief lent an independent air to spiritual life. Enchanted by Russian versions of the Psalms, the young Lomonosov managed to make his way to Moscow to study prosody by joining a caravan of salted fish. He contrived to enrol in the Slav-Greek-Latin Academy by declaring himself to be a nobleman: only through deception could he leap from the tax-paying to the service estates. Thanks to his evident abilities he was invited to become a student at the newly established Academy of Sciences, which was desperately short of home-grown talent, and he was sent to study in Germany.

On his return he was appointed at different stages to teach chemistry, mineralogy, rhetoric, versification and Russian language at the Academy, in all of which fields he made significant contributions. He also led a campaign to free higher education of German influence by establishing a Russian university in Moscow, which opened in 1755. His theory of the three levels of the Russian language did much to establish a consistent written language out of the confusion of Church Slavonic, bureaucratic and spoken Russian. Like Peter, however, he supplemented his work of enlightenment with episodes of coarse abuse, when he would make obscene gestures at German colleagues and call them Hundsfotter and Spitzbuben.

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THE TENSIONS OF PETER’S HERITAGE Rousseau wrote in his Social Contract that in certain circumstances the ruler has no choice but ‘to force men to be free’. One cannot help recalling the phrase when considering Peter’s measures. He was artificially implanting enterprise, probity, discipline and the spirit of enquiry because such qualities had only the thinnest of soil in Russia in which to take root. For that reason the artifical implant gave rise to unwelcome side-effects: superficial knowledge, backsliding, insincerity and hypocrisy.

Peter’s solution, as in administrative matters, was supervision by the state, or at least by officials appointed and trusted by him. They were policemen, for whom Peter had a special regard, as the regulation he composed for them in 1724 testifies: ‘The police has its special calling: which is to intervene to protect justice and rights, to generate good order and morals, to guarantee safety from thieves, robbers, rapists and extortioners, to extirpate disordered and loose living. It binds everyone to labour and an honest profession … It defends widows, orphans and foreigners in accordance with God’s law, educates the young in chaste purity and honest learning; in short, for all of these, the police is the soul of citizenship and of all good order.

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