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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