PETER I (RUSSIA) (1672–1725; ruled 1682–1725)

PETER I (RUSSIA) (1672–1725; ruled 1682–1725), tsar of Russia. Peter I, who was formally known as Peter the Great after defeating Sweden in the Great Northern War in 1721, has long defined the transition from old to modern Russia in Russian historical consciousness. Although recent scholarship has modified this view somewhat, pointing out the antecedents of his reforms and the unchanged reality of Russia as a state built on the pillars of agriculture, elite service, and servile labor, few would challenge the defining character of the Petrine era for Russia's subsequent sense of its own modernity.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

By the time of Peter's accession in 1682, Muscovy had become a vast and sprawling realm, subsuming most of the east Slavic world, as well as the vast and barely explored Siberian expanse. It lacked access to the Baltic Sea to the north and the Black Sea to the south and suffered on the southern steppe border from debilitating raids by nomadic and pastoral peoples. In pursuit of a Baltic presence, Peter clashed with the equally ambitious Charles XII of Sweden and became enmeshed in the Great Northern War, a conflagration lasting over two decades, ending victoriously for Russia only in 1721 with the Treaty of Nystadt. Simultaneously, Peter faced a southern war against the Ottoman Empire, allied with Sweden for most of the Northern War.

Unsuccessful battles at Azov against the Ottomans in 1695–1696 set Peter's drastic reform of state and military structures in motion, convincing him of the urgency of building a navy. After opening a shipyard on the lower Volga River, in Voronezh, he departed on his vaunted Great Embassy, an extended journey through Europe, traveling nominally incognito as a captain ("Peter Mikhailov") largely to avoid ceremonial obligations at foreign courts. He spent most of 1697–1698 abroad, in Holland, England, the Germanies, and France, observing trades and hiring hundreds of craftsmen and naval officers to work in Russia building and training a fleet. Upon his return he inaugurated a flurry of changes, mostly designed to build a formidable navy and maximize the number of men in arms. These included establishing a Navigational (later Naval) Academy and initiating a military draft to replace the outmoded mobilization of peasant militias. Beginning in 1705 one adult male in seventy was to be drafted, and, during the course of the Northern War, the ratio fell as low as one in twenty. Those drafted served for life, and their legal status became that of soldier. While the number of those in arms was not dramatically greater than before, perhaps a quarter million at its peak, these soldiers, organized into permanent regiments and detachments, were far better trained and equipped than their forebears.

The dual war against Sweden and the Ottoman Empire (and, at the end of the reign, against Persia) constituted an immense drain on resources and cost tens of thousands of lives. After succumbing to Sweden's superior forces at Narva, in contemporary Estonia, in 1700, Peter's forces slowly gained an upper hand, most spectacularly in the south at Poltava in 1709. A significant setback in 1711 at Pruth, north of the Caspian Sea, nearly cost Peter his life and much of his army, but they recovered, and by 1714 the tide of war had turned decisively in Russia's favor. The final victory and Treaty of 1721 secured Russia's place in Europe's northern waters, and it began Russia's extended push to the south, a process not completed until the 1780s.

PERSONAL AND COURT LIFE

Biographies of Peter emphasize his untraditional upbringing in the suburban Muscovite village of Preobrazhensky. Removed from the confines of the Moscow Kremlin, he spent much of his boyhood playing at war, in the company of commoners and foreigners rather than with churchmen and the scions of aristocratic families, as had been the norm. Peter's height (over six-and-a-half feet tall) and energy, his unquenchable curiosity, in particular for practical technologies, and his bawdiness and impatience with the formalities of tradition also are invariably seen as embodying his differences from those who preceded him to the throne. This tendency toward earthiness manifested itself in drunken and debauched revelry with his confreres at court, Peter's so-called fledglings, but the Petrine "culture of laughter" had a political and ritualized side beyond the mere exercise of merriment. Peter created mock institutions, such as His Majesty's Most-Drunken Synod, as an antidote to the solemnities of the church hierarchy—to which he nevertheless regularly had to submit—as if to emphasize the tsar's independence of them and his devotion to this-worldly endeavors. He created the mock title of "Prince Pope," a playful alter ego sometimes termed the Russian John Barleycorn.

CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS REFORM

Peter's cultural revolution often took on a decidedly coercive cast. Symbolic of his statist and modernizing vision was the establishment of a new capital, St. Petersburg, situated in the swampy territory of Ingermanland, on the site of a small fortress on the southeastern rim of the Gulf of Finland. First proclaimed in 1704, the capital's initial permanent structures were completed in 1707, when the government began to shift from Moscow. Situated far from the center of Russian population, with a German name, a decidedly un-Russian rectilinear street pattern, and distinctly European architecture, the new capital stood as a powerful statement of the massive Europeanization to which Peter meant to subject his realm.

Taxes on beards and sleeves, first imposed in 1699–1700, obliged serving men to break with Muscovite appearances and adopt European dress. The balls at court, culminating in the 1718 decree on "assemblies," imposed a new Europeanized public sociability at court, one that commanded the visible presence of women as well as men at balls, formal dinners, and celebrations. The switch in 1700 to the Julian calendar (previously the new year had occurred on September 1), and counting the years from the birth of Christ rather than from creation, commanded nothing less than a renovatio of time. The imposition of a new "civil" alphabet in 1707, which over time became the orthography of officialdom and secularity, reinforced in highly visible ways the symbolic separation of the church's spiritual realm (Church Slavonic and the religious calendar) from the state's civic realm.

Peter's determination to separate the church from and subordinate it to the state defined his entire approach to ecclesiastical authority, culminating in the elimination of the patriarchate in 1721 and its replacement by a governmental body, the Holy Synod. Peter's relationships to church and religion were more complex than mere caesaropapism, however. Sincerely if eccentrically religious, he held redemption and salvation paramount, and he relied on clergy to help him rule and reign. Leading ecclesiastic officials, such as Feofan Prokopovich and Gavriil Buzhinskii (the first rector of the Alexander Nevski monastery), articulated the ideological legitimation for Peter's reforms and produced the defining panegyrics of his reign and legacy. Parish clergy were required (at least by the terms of the Spiritual Regulation of 1721) to act as agencies of the law as well as of the soul, by reading aloud new decrees and keeping parish registries and confession lists. The large monastic clergy, whom Peter viewed as little more than parasites, experienced reform personally as Peter closed approximately two-thirds of Russia's monasteries and submitted the rest to a test of their social utility.

SOCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE POLICIES

It would be a mistake to imagine that Peter's reforms followed an orderly or systematic path. Nevertheless, a functionalist schema suggested by the early-twentieth-century historian Paul Miliukov effectively captures the dynamics of policy reform. Military necessity drove technological and military reform, whose immense costs (commanding up to 90 percent of the budget) necessitated changes in taxation and in mass mobilization. Thus, Peter imposed numerous tariffs and luxury taxes before transforming direct taxation in 1724 from a household basis to a per capita "soul tax" of 74 kopecks, which counted adult males (with certain exemptions). He eliminated slavery, making all former slaves into serfs, who were thus subject to the soul tax and military recruitment. Changes such as these demanded comparable reforms in central and provincial administration, the conducting of regular censuses, and the overhaul of state service.

Peter's interventions in the landed nobility were particularly momentous. Having done away with the last of the landed militias, and freed from the old system of precedence (Mestnichestvo), Peter pursued ad hoc strategies to make service more professional. As before, service remained compulsory, but it was deemed a full-time, lifelong obligation, slowly transforming noble serving men into absentee landlords. Seeking to loosen the stranglehold of elite noble clans, Peter collapsed all forms of land tenure into hereditary land, and he elevated several foreigners and lowborn Russians to positions of authority, nominally on the basis of ability. This latter practice was institutionalized in 1722 with the Table of Ranks and Orders, which pegged specific work to specific ranks, salaries, and privileges. In addition to eliminating virtually all of the Muscovite terms of status, such as "boyar" and "boyar's son," the Table of Ranks created a mechanism of advancement, at least on paper, whereby untitled servitors could advance first to personal nobility and then to hereditary nobility. Peter also intervened directly in familial inheritance by abolishing partible inheritance in 1714 in favor of unigeniture, wherein one son would inherit the entire estate. Deeply resented by noble families, unigeniture was dropped in 1731 and partible inheritance returned.

To maintain administration during his frequent absences, he created the Ruling Senate in 1711, which had the power of decree in the tsar's name. Originally composed of his closest advisers, the Senate took on a more bureaucratic cast toward the end of his reign, when Peter replaced the Muscovite system of ad hoc civil chancelleries with twelve functionally defined colleges, each of which was to be run by a council rather than by a single individual as in a ministerial system. Each college was represented in the revised Senate. Provincial government underwent a somewhat more modest reorganization in 1708 with the creation of eight vast territorial governments. These territorial governments had almost no direct contact with the populations over which they nominally ruled. As before, the exercise of governmental authority in the provinces relied mostly on a mixture of military presence and unpaid office holding. Exceptions to this rule were tax collecting and military recruitment, placed in the hands of a cadre of armed horsemen called fiscals, a group whose name became synonymous with violence and brute confiscation.

The disruptions generated by these widely unpopular policies engendered extensive popular resentment and periodic waves of armed resistance and defections from his ranks. These included rebellions by Moscow's musketeers (strel'tsy) in 1697, Cossack-led rebellions (Bulavin's revolt in 1707 and Mazepa's defection to the Swedes in 1708), and Old Believer riots (1703–1704 and later). Numerous elements of Russia's population looked upon the era as one of oppression and betrayal and upon the tsar as a tyrant, usurper, and Antichrist. All such opposition met fierce repression; none elicited moderation or concessions.

SUCCESSION

A combination of familial rivalry (the disinheritance of his eldest son, Alexis, and his death in prison before his planned execution in 1718) and misfortune (the death of his youngest son, Peter, in 1716) deprived Peter of direct male heirs. In response, Peter decreed a new form of succession in 1722 in which the reigning monarch named the successor. This shortsighted decision virtually guaranteed periodic instability at court, especially when a ruler died without naming a successor, as was the case with Peter himself. Unintentionally, however, it opened the way for nearly a century of female rule by displacing the principle of father-son lineage. Peter's widow, Catherine, thus became Russia's first crowned female ruler in 1725.

See also Alexis I (Russia) ; Catherine II (Russia) ; Church and State Relations ; Moscow ; Northern Wars ; Russia ; St. Petersburg ; Taxation .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Pososhkhóv, Iván. The Book of Poverty and Wealth. Translated by L. R. Lewitter and A. P. Vlasto. Stanford, 1987.

The Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great. Edited and translated by Alexander V. Muller. Seattle, 1972.

Secondary Sources

Anisimov, Evgenii V. The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Coercion in Russia. Translated by John T. Alexander. Armonk, N.Y., 1993.

Bushkovitch, Paul. Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. London, 1971.

Hughes, Lindsey. Peter the Great: A Biography. New Haven, 2002.

——. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, 1998.

Peterson, Claes. Peter the Great's Administrative and Judicial Reforms: Swedish Antecedents and the Process of Reception. Translated by Michael F. Metcalf. Stockholm, 1979.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought. New York, 1985.

Gary Marker

Peter I

Peter I (1672-1725), called Peter the Great, was czar of Russia from 1682 to 1725. His reign was marked by a program of extensive reform known as Westernization and by the establishment of Russia as a major European power.

Contemporaries abroad tended to admire Peter I for his reforms and to fear him because of his country's growing power, but his reforms were generally unpopular with his subjects, not only because they entailed higher taxes and harder work for almost everyone but also because they disturbed ancient religious and cultural traditions. After his death, Russians soon came to realize that Peter had been the country's greatest ruler and that his reign had indeed been a high point in their history. That evaluation is still generally accepted by historians.

Peter was born in Moscow on May 30, 1672, the only son of Czar Alexis and his second wife, Natalia Naryshkin. The 13 children of Alexis' previous marriage included 3 who became prominent during Peter's youth: able and ambitious Sophia, half-blind and half-witted Ivan, and amiable Feodor, who succeeded Alexis in 1676.

Peter's formal education, entrusted to private tutors, began when he was 7 but was interrupted 3 years later, when Czar Feodor died without having named an heir. Sophia and a small group of supporters favored the frail Ivan, her 15-year-old brother, to succeed Feodor. Another group favored the robust and intelligent Peter and at once proclaimed him czar, planning that his mother serve as regent. That arrangement was quickly upset, however, when Sophia received the help of the Moscow troops and compelled the installation of Ivan as "First Czar, " Peter as "Second Czar, " and herself as regent.

Formative Years

During the next 7 years little was required of Peter except that he take part in formal ceremonies. Fascinated by military activities, he spent much time at games involving arms practice and battle maneuvers, at first with young friends and later with two regiments of soldiers that he was permitted to recruit and train. His curiosity and abundant energy led him also to the study and practice of the skills involved in navigation and such crafts as carpentry, stonecutting, and printing. In the course of these pursuits, he came into contact with a number of foreign residents and gained from them knowledge of the world outside Russia.

Disturbed by the trend of his development, Peter's mother mistakenly decided that she could change it by arranging for his marriage; at her direction, he was married to Eudoxia Lopukhin in January 1689. Still, he showed no inclination to forgo his first interests or his unconventional activities.

Political opposition to Sophia's regency came to a head during Peter's 17th year, and, impressed by the assurance of strong support if he would assert himself, Peter declared her office vacant and sent her away to a convent. That done, he returned to his habitual pursuits and continued to neglect personal responsibilities, even after Eudoxia had borne him a son, Alexis, in 1690. By that time he was a striking figure, impressive as a potential ruler but with scant interest in the duties involved.

It was not until 1695, when he had his first taste of actual fighting, against the Turkish forces at Azov, that Peter began to give serious thought to the problems he faced as czar. The death of "First Czar" Ivan during the following year finally brought him close to the full import of his position.

First Steps

Having been impressed at Azov by his country's lack of adequate fighting ships, Peter began with characteristic zeal to plan for an efficient navy. He sent groups of young men to western European countries to study navigation and shipbuilding; then, in 1697, he himself followed—an unprecedented step for a Russian czar—to acquire firsthand information and to hire shipwrights for service in Russia. He visited Holland, England, Germany, and Austria. In those countries he was impressed not only by their technological superiority over Russia but also by what seemed to him a superior style of life. When he returned to Russia in 1698, he was ready to make many changes.

One of Peter's first acts was to order that men shave off their beards, and when he met stubborn resistance, he modified his order only to the extent of imposing a tax on those who chose to keep their beards. He also shattered tradition by requiring that the old Russian calendar (which reckoned time from the creation of the world) be abandoned in favor of the Julian calendar used in the West. At the same time, he was dealing with two other matters, a revolt among the Moscow troops and the annoying presence of his unwanted wife, Eudoxia; he speedily quelled the revolt with savage executions and terminated his marriage by forcing Eudoxia into a convent.

Great Northern War

The handling of some of his problems, Peter soon learned, required more than his usual imperious tactics. During his European tour, he had obtained assurances of Western cooperation in forcing Sweden to cede the territory that Russia needed as an outlet to the Baltic Sea. He began the undertaking by a declaration of war on Sweden in 1700.

Peter led his forces in their first major encounter with the Swedes at Narva in November 1700 and was severely defeated by inferior numbers. Resorting to the means he had used with the navy—remodeling by Western patterns—he began at once to whip into shape a better organized, equipped, and trained army. In 1703 he led it to a redeeming victory and took from Sweden the mouth of the Neva River. He designated the site for a city to be named St. Petersburg and to become the imperial capital. A year later he captured Narva.

Taking advantage of a few years of respite while the Swedes were engaged with other enemies, Peter worked purposefully to strengthen Russian arms and to keep under control the domestic discontent that was breaking into open revolt in many areas, particularly along the Don and the Volga rivers. He was obliged to return to the war in mid-1709, however, to meet a Swedish invasion led by Charles XII. The opposing forces met at Poltava, where the Russians won a decisive victory. The battle did not end the war, but it marked a turning point and vindicated Peter's belief in his methods. Moreover, it had a profound psychological effect on the western European states, who now saw Russia as a formidable power.

Twelve years of indecisive hostilities followed the Poltava victory. In 1711 Peter had to divert some of his troops to the south, where the Turks, encouraged by Sweden, had attacked Russia. After a year of unsuccessful fighting, he had to cede the port of Azov, Russia's only point of access to the Black Sea. Meanwhile, intermittent fighting kept the main war going, and it was not until 1718 that Sweden reluctantly agreed to a consideration of peace terms. By the resulting Treaty of Nystad, signed in September 1721, Sweden ceded Ingria, Estonia, Livonia, and a portion of Karelia, thus giving Russia a firm foothold on the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea. Since Peter had already established Russian influence in Courland, his country was now a major Baltic power, having been provided with "a window to Europe" by the new acquisitions. In recognition of what he had achieved, the Russian Senate, a body created by Peter, conferred upon him the titles of "the Great" and "Emperor."

Personal Problems

After he freed himself of Eudoxia, Peter became attracted to Catherine Skavrenska, a Lithuanian girl of humble origin, and married her secretly, delaying until 1712 the public recognition of her as his consort. When Catherine bore a son, the Czar had him christened Peter Petrovich and anticipated his succession to the throne. Alexis, the son by his first marriage, had become a lazy, weak-willed, and hostile young man who resisted being molded to his father's standards. In the belief that Alexis was actually plotting against the throne, Peter ordered that he be taken to prison; and there, after being questioned under torture, Alexis died. Yet the Czar's problem was not solved: in 1719 Peter Petrovich died, leaving him no son as successor. Alexis had left a son, Peter Alekseyevich; but the Czar chose to bypass him and to decree, in 1722, that thereafter each ruler of Russia was free to name his heir. It is probable that Peter intended to name his wife, Catherine, as his heir, but he continued to postpone the formality.

Domestic Reforms

Although Peter carried out many reforms in his early years as czar, his major work as a reformer was done in the last decade of his reign. His goal was to create a powerful and prosperous state, efficiently and honestly administered, to which every subject could contribute. To achieve that goal, he refashioned many existing institutions and initiated new policies, generally guided by what he had learned of western Europe. He reorganized the country's entire administrative structure and promulgated the Table of Ranks, classifying civil service, military, and naval positions and providing for advancement on the basis of merit from lower to higher positions. He encouraged industry and commerce, spurred the development of science, and laid the foundations of the Academy of Sciences, which was established soon after his death. He instituted Russia's secular schools, eliminated the obsolete characters from the Russian alphabet, and established the country's first newspaper.

Even the Church felt the force of Peter's great energy. Although a religious man, he had no respect for the privileges accorded to the Church, was critical of many of its policies, and resented its resistance to his reforms. When Patriarch Adrian, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, died in 1700, Peter did not permit the vacancy to be filled. Finally, in 1721, he abolished the post of patriarch, substituting for it the Holy Synod, a board of prelates who were to direct the affairs of the Church under the supervision of a layman appointed by the czar.

Apparently, Peter found his greatest satisfaction in the development of St. Petersburg. He intended that this modern city become the center of the new Russia as Moscow had been the center of the old. He declared it to be the country's new capital and gradually transferred to it the central administrative offices. Built in Western style rather than the traditional Russian, it provided a visible symbol of his reforms.

Last Years

After the war with Sweden, Peter began to think seriously of his country's interests in Asia. At his direction, Russian forces conquered Kamchatka on the Pacific, and a Russian expedition explored the area now known as the Bering Strait. With prospects of more immediate value, he successfully pursued a war against Persia to strengthen Russia's position on the Caspian.

The treaty ending the war with Persia had yet to be ratified in 1724, when Peter's health began to fail rapidly. Characteristically, he continued to drive himself to the very limit of his strength, still postponing the designation of an heir. He died on Jan. 28, 1725, in the city that he had founded.

Further Reading

A study of Peter I is L. Jay Oliva, Russia in the Era of Peter the Great (1969). Ian Grey, Peter the Great (1960), is a comprehensive biography based on recent scholarship. A superb account of Peter's reign is Vasilii O. Klyuchevsky, Peter the Great, translated by Liliana Archibald (1958). Benedict Humphrey Sumner provides a brief, lucid survey of Peter's place in Russian history in Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (1950). Sumner also wrote the more specialized Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (1949).

Eugene Schuyler, Peter the Great (2 vols., 1884), is the most detailed biography available in English; it is somewhat dated but quite useful. Marc Raeff, ed., Peter the Great: Reformer or Revolutionary? (1963), is a collection of differing views about Peter by his contemporaries and later observers. Raeff's Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-century Nobility (1966) details the profound changes that Peter made in Russian society. The myth created around the image of Peter is discussed in Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (1961). Peter's life was fictionalized in Alexei Tolstoy, Peter the Great (trans. 1936). □

Peter I or Peter the Great, 1672–1725, czar of Russia (1682–1725), major figure in the development of imperial Russia.

Early Life

Peter was the youngest child of Czar Alexis, by Alexis's second wife, Natalya Naryshkin. From Alexis's first marriage (with Maria Miloslavsky) were born Feodor III, Sophia Alekseyevna, and the semi-imbecile Ivan. On Feodor III's death (1682), a struggle broke out for the succession between the Naryshkin and Miloslavsky factions. The Naryshkins at first succeeded in setting Ivan aside in favor of 10-year-old Peter. Shortly afterward, however, the Miloslavsky party incited the streltsi (semimilitary formations in Moscow) to rebellion. In the bloody disorder that followed, Peter witnessed the murders of many of his supporters. As a result of the rebellion Ivan, as Ivan V , was made (1682) joint czar with Peter, under the regency of Sophia Alekseyevna .

A virtual exile, Peter spent most of his childhood in a suburb of Moscow, surrounded by playmates drawn both from the nobility and from the roughest social elements. His talent for leadership soon became apparent when he organized military games that became regular maneuvers in siegecraft. In addition, Peter began to experiment with shipbuilding on Lake Pereyaslavl (now Lake Pleshcheyevo). Peter learned the rudiments of Western military science from the European soldiers and adventurers who lived in a foreign settlement near Moscow. His most influential foreign friends, Patrick Gordon of Scotland, François Lefort of Geneva, and Franz Timmermann of Holland, came from this colony. In 1689, Sophia Alekseyevna attempted a coup against Peter; this time, however, aided by the loyal part of the streltsi, he overthrew the regent. For several years, until Peter assumed personal rule, the Naryshkins ran the government. Ivan V, whose death in 1696 left Peter sole czar, took no part in the government.

Sole Ruler

Foreign Policy

Russia was almost continuously at war during Peter's reign. In the 16th and early 17th cent. the country had fought periodically in the northwest against Sweden, in an attempt to gain access to the Baltic Sea, and in the south against the Ottoman Empire. While continuing the policy of his predecessors, Peter drew Russia into European affairs and helped to make it a great power. His earliest venture was the conquest of Azov from the Ottomans in 1696, after an unsuccessful attempt in 1695. Peter then embarked on a European tour (1697–98), traveling partly incognito, to form a grand alliance against the Ottoman Empire and to acquire the Western techniques necessary to modernize Russia's armed forces. He failed to form an anti-Ottoman alliance, but his conversations with the Polish king and others led eventually (1699) to a coalition against Sweden.

Peter also gained considerable knowledge of European industrial techniques (he even spent some time working as a ship's carpenter in Holland) and hired many European artisans for service in Russia. In 1698 he returned to Russia, began to modernize the armed forces, and launched domestic reforms. After concluding (1700) peace with the Ottomans, Peter, in alliance with Denmark and the combined Saxony-Poland, began the Northern War (1700–1721) against Charles XII of Sweden. Although disastrously defeated at first, he routed Charles at Poltava in 1709 and by the Treaty of Nystad (1721) retained his conquests of Ingermanland, Karelia, and Livonia.

Peter's conquests in the south were less permanent. Azov was restored to the Ottoman Empire in 1711; Derbent, Baku, and the southern coast of the Caspian Sea, conquered in a war (1722–23) with Persia, were soon lost again. In the east, Russia extended its control over part of Siberia but failed to subjugate either Khiva or Bokhara. Peter's first diplomatic missions to China were unsuccessful but his efforts led to the Treaty of Kyakhta (1727), which fixed the Russo-Chinese border and established commercial relations. Peter's interest in imperial expansion led to the financing of the first voyage of Vitus Bering .

Domestic Policy

Peter had returned to Russia in 1698 at the news of a military revolt allegedly instigated by Sophia Alekseyevna. He took drastic vengeance on his opponents and forced Sophia into a convent. On the day after his return, Peter personally cut off the beards of his nobles and shortly thereafter ordered them to replace their long robes and conical hats with Western dress. This attack on the symbols of old Muscovy marked the beginning of Peter's attempt to force Russia to adopt European appearance and other features of Western culture. Most of Peter's reforms followed his predecessors' tentative steps, but his demonic pace and brutal methods created an impression of revolutionary change.

The reforms were sporadic and uncoordinated; many of them grew out of the needs of Peter's almost continuous warfare. He introduced conscription on a territorial basis, enlarged and modernized the army, founded and expanded the navy, and established technical schools to train men for military service. To finance this huge military establishment, he created state monopolies, introduced the first poll tax, and placed levies on every conceivable item. Peter encouraged and subsidized private industry and established state mines and factories to provide adequate supplies of war materials. Peter reformed the administrative machinery of the state. He introduced a supervisory senate and a new system of central administration and tried to reform provincial and local government.

Peter also attempted to subordinate all classes of Russian society to the needs of the state. He enlarged the service nobility (the body of nobles who owed service to the state), imposed further duties on it, and forced the sons of nobles to attend technical schools. To control the nobles he introduced the Table of Ranks, which established a bureaucratic hierarchy in which promotion was based on merit rather than on birth. The nobility's economic position was strengthened by changes in the laws of land tenure. The serfs (who paid the bulk of taxes and made up most of the soldiery) were bound more securely to their masters and to the land. Peter subordinated the church to the state by replacing the patriarchate with a holy synod, headed by a lay procurator appointed by the czar.

Peter introduced changes in manners and mores. The ban on beards and Muscovite dress was extended to the entire male population, women were released from their servile position, and attempts were made to improve the manners of the court and administration. Peter sent many Russians to be schooled in the West and was responsible for the foundation (1725) of the Academy of Sciences. He reformed the calendar and simplified the alphabet. The transfer of the capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg , built on the swamps of Ingermanland at tremendous human cost, was a dramatic symbol of Peter's reforms. Although Peter sought to enforce all his reforms with equal severity, he was unable to eradicate the traditional corruption of officials or to impose Western ways on the peasantry.

His reforms were often considered whimsical and sacrilegious and met widespread opposition. The conservatives among the clergy accused him of being the antichrist. The discontented looked to Peter's son, Alexis , who was eventually tried for treason on flimsy evidence and was tortured to death (1718). In 1721, Peter had himself proclaimed "emperor of all Russia." In 1722 he declared the choice of a successor to be dependent on the sovereign's will; this decree (valid until the reign of Paul I) preceded the coronation (1724) of his second wife as Empress Catherine I. She was a Livonian peasant girl whom Peter had made his mistress, then his wife (1712) after repudiating his first consort. Her accession on Peter's death was largely engineered by Peter's chief lieutenant and favorite, A. D. Menshikov . Although many of Peter's innovations were too hasty and arbitrary to be successful, his reign was decisive in the long process of transforming medieval Muscovy into modern Russia.

Personality and Achievements

Peter's personal traits ranged from bestial cruelty and vice to the most selfless devotion to Russia; his order to his troops at Poltava read, "Remember that you are fighting not for Peter but for the state." Despite the convulsive fits that plagued him, he had a bearlike constitution, was of gigantic stature, and possessed herculean physical prowess. He drank himself into stupors and indulged in all conceivable vices but could rouse himself at a moment's notice, and he was willing to undergo all the physical exertions and privations that he exacted from his subjects.

Peter subordinated the lives and liberties of his subjects to his own conception of the welfare of the state. Like many of his successors, he concluded that ruthless reform was necessary to overcome Russia's backwardness. Peter remains one of the most controversial figures in Russian history. Those who regard Russia as essentially European praise him for his policy of Westernization, and others who consider Russia a unique civilization attack him for turning Russia from its special path of development. Those impressed by imperial expansion and state and social reforms tend to regard Peter's arbitrary and brutal methods as necessary, while others appalled by his disregard of human life conclude that the cost outweighed any gains.

Bibliography

The first biographer of Peter the Great was Voltaire. See later biographies by R. K. Massie (1980) and H. Troyat (1987); study by N. V. Riasanovsky (1985); L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998).

Peter I ( the Great) (1672–1725) Russian Tsar (1682–1725), regarded as the founder of modern Russia. After ruling jointly with his half-brother Ivan (1682–89), he gained sole control in 1689. Peter employed foreign experts to modernize the army, transport, and technology, visiting European countries to study developments. He compelled the aristocracy and the Church to serve the interests of the State, eliminating ancient tradition in favour of modernization. In the Great Northern War, Russia replaced Sweden as the dominant power in n Europe, and gained lands on the Baltic, where Peter built his new capital, St Petersburg. In the e, he warred against Turks and Persians and initiated the exploration of Siberia.

Peter I (or Peter the Great) (1672–1725) Tsar of Russia (1682–1725). After the death of his half-brother Ivan in 1696 Peter I assumed sole authority and launched a policy of expansion along the Baltic coast. Modernizing his armed forces he waged the Great Northern War (1700–21) against Charles XII of Sweden, and went on to annex Estonia and Latvia, as well as parts of Finland, following the defeat of the Swedish monarch. Peter I's introduction of extensive government and administration reforms were instrumental in transforming Russia into a significant European power. In 1703 he made St Petersburg his capital.