Читать книгу Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917 - Geoffrey Hosking - Страница 14

In the early eighteenth century the strains and rifts imposed on Russian society by the pursuit of empire during the previous century and a half were intensified by the active importation of foreign technological, social and cultural models designed to transform Russia into a fully European power. This alien inflow was necessary: if Russia was to protect her newly acquired imperial territories, she had to be able to match the military potential of the strongest European powers; but it was nonetheless extremely damaging to her social and ethnic cohesion.

By the end of the seventeenth century, Muscovy ruled a huge realm in northern Asia, but it had not yet succeeded in making its strategic situation secure, either from the raiders of the steppe or from the European powers to its west. True, it had won impressive victories against Poland, and with them a good deal of territory, but only after a long and exhausting war. In the north and west it was still blocked off from the Baltic and vulnerable to Swedish imperial designs, while in the south the danger of destructive Tatar raids had not been banned. If it was to remain an empire, it had to be able to defend its own territories, not only in the south and east but now especially in the west, from where the greatest dangers threatened.

In addition, the economic resources of its territories, potentially greater than those of any other power in the world, lay still almost wholly unmobilized. The vast distances, the primitive transport, the often infertile soil and the economic backwardness of the population made it difficult to develop mining, manufacture and trade, while Russia’s land-locked situation, hemmed round by ice-bound ports and straits controlled by potential enemies, obstructed foreign commerce. The truth was that a long-term imperial future could not be secured without a marked improvement in the standard of Russia’s armed forces and an activation of the resources of land and population.

In the early years of his reign, Peter I succeeded, though with great difficulty, in capturing the Turkish fortress of Azov, at the mouth of the Don, and thus gaining a precarious outlet to the Black Sea. But the uncertain nature of Russian military power was demonstrated by the failure of the first attempt for more than a hundred years to obtain a foothold on the Baltic: his large army, attempting to capture the port city of Narva, suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of a much smaller force of Swedes (1700).

Narva, however, proved to be a turning-point. Peter was deeply affected by the humiliation, and drew lessons from the experience-lessons which did not change his policies in their essentials, but imparted to them a new radicalism and a new sense of determination. He was already by character and upbringing disposed to make Russia more European, not just by bringing the country into the interplay of military and diplomatic forces which constituted European great power politics, but also by assimilating the new technology and the new ways of thinking which had transformed the life of the leading European states during the seventeenth century.

In his teenage years, when he was joint Tsar, foreigners were still isolated in a special suburb just outside Moscow, the so-called nemetskaia sloboda, or ‘German suburb’, to prevent them corrupting the morals of honest Russians. Their segregation attested to the suspicion with which Muscovites regarded the outside world, and especially the ‘crafty ways’ of the West. Peter had violated the taboos surrounding the sloboda by not only visiting the disreputable place, but striking up friendships there and engaging in long conversations with the traders, craftsmen and mercenaries. From his youth he went clean-shaven and in Western clothes, to the consternation of most of his contemporaries, and he ate meat during fast days, in contravention of Orthodox practice.

Inspired by an astrolabe which Prince Dolgorukii brought back from France, he began eagerly to study arithmetic, geometry, navigation, ballistics and fortification under the Dutchman Franz Timmerman. He took to wearing a Dutch sailor’s uniform and calling himself a ‘bombardier’. He listened with fascination to his tutor, Nikita Zotov, recounting the military campaigns of his father, Tsar Alexei, and, anxious to try out his own ideas, he formed ‘play regiments’ among the young noblemen of the court. He dressed them in dark green uniform, equipped them with weapons from the court arsenal, and led them out on manoeuvres which were far from being ‘play’ in the normal sense of the word: some of them involved thousands of people and led to injuries and deaths.¹

When he was able to occupy the throne on his own, he violated Muscovite taboos on an even grander scale, by visiting the macrocosm from which the little world of the nemetskaia sloboda derived: Europe, and especially the maritime Protestant countries of northern Europe. During 1697–8, he travelled through the Swedish Baltic provinces, Poland, Prussia, Holland, England and Austria, under the assumed name of Petr Mikhailov, non-commissioned officer of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment (on solemn occasions he expected all the same to be received with the honours due to him).

This expedition was a kind of precursor of the ‘industrial espionage’ of our own days, with the Tsar officially (but not actually) incognito as the principal intelligence agent. In Königsberg he took a short course in artillery, in Amsterdam he worked as a carpenter in the shipbuilding yards, in London he visited factories, workshops, the observatory, the arsenal and the Royal Mint, and he attended a meeting of the Royal Society, which inspired him with ideas about how the state should patronize science and technology.² Most of this was about as far from royal dignity, especially in its Muscovite variant, as could be imagined, but he picked up in a haphazard way what he wanted from the journey, and he returned with the conviction that Russia must become more like the countries he had visited, not just in its military technology, but in social, cultural and intellectual life too.

He had to break off his journey and return prematurely to deal with a rebellion of the strel’tsy. Set up by Ivan IV to provide an infantry force with firearms, they had long been rendered superfluous by the advance of military science. Their way of life was a prime example of the marriage of privilege with obsolete technology which Peter was determined to eliminate, and he proceeded against them with vindictive ferocity, executing several hundred of their leaders, and then disbanding all their regiments. At the same time, he instituted his programme of introducing Western customs by issuing a decree forbidding the wearing of beards in polite society, and taking the shears personally to reluctant courtiers. It is difficult to imagine a grosser insult to inherited notions of male dignity and piety: Orthodox considered that beards were essential for God-fearing men, and it was popularly held that the clean-shaven could not gain admittance to heaven.

MILITARY REFORM AND INDUSTRY The humiliating defeat at Narva occurred the following year, and it sharpened Peter’s sense of urgency about change. The lesson he drew was one which his foreign journey had already disposed him to accept: that his army, though large, was insufficiently trained and inadequately equipped to fight open battles against the finest European armies, of which the Swedish was one. Methods which had served well in the ‘wild field’ against swift but lightly armed horsemen, weapons which had sufficed – though barely – against the Polish and Ottoman forces, revealed their deficiencies when pitted against the full might of Charles XII’s troops.

Peter now had to lead Russia through what many European armies had undergone in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the process which historians, if hesitantly, refer to as the ‘military revolution’.³ The key elements in this revolution were: (i) the deployment of large masses of well-disciplined infantry equipped with firearms; (ii) the use of highly mobile light cavalry able to fight when necessary as infantry (dragoons); (iii) an increase in the size and penetrative power of artillery, (iv) a strengthening of fortifications designed to withstand this artillery.

These innovations enormously increased the cost of warfare, compelling all European states to devise more effective means of mobilizing the human and natural resources at their disposal, with far-reaching and durable consequences for their forms of government.⁴ In some respects, for all its backwardness, Russia was at a distinct advantage compared with its rivals in carrying through this process. The society was already structured for service to the state, and the privileges and immunities enjoyed by social groups were much weaker than almost anywhere else in Europe, which meant that taxation and recruitment were in principle easier for its rulers to achieve.

Especially under Tsar Alexei, Muscovy had made a start to its military revolution during the seventeenth century, but in a piecemeal manner which failed to deliver maximum benefit. Since its service nobles stuck firmly to the cavalry style of warfare they had learned on the steppes, ‘new-style’ formations had to be commanded and partly manned by foreigners. Like the traditional levies, they disbanded every autumn to other pursuits, so that the government would not have the expense of supporting them till the next campaigning season opened in the spring. By the 1680s the new-style formations outnumbered the traditional forces, and a reform of the army’s whole structure had become overdue, so that it could adopt the latest strategies and technologies consistently.⁵

One of the main problems was that warfare was still essentially state-supported private enterprise. Even the new-style soldiers were still raised, clothed and equipped by individual pomeshchiki out of the income from their estates. Now originally, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the pomest’e had been a service estate, like the Ottoman timar, distinct from the votchina, or patrimonial estate, in that it was held on condition of state service being duly discharged. By the late seventeenth century, however, the distinction had been almost completely eroded: the pomest’e had become heritable property, with the result that pomeshchiki no longer had a strong material interest in their military service – though they might render it out of family pride.

Peter decided that the burden of recruiting, training and equipping the troops must henceforth fall directly on the state, which could be done by reinstating the service principle of landholding theoretically still in force. Rather than an army of semi-feudal levies, he aimed to create a regular standing army, and one, moreover, which would be permanently on war footing and not disbanded every winter. From 1705 he imposed the rekrutchina: the system whereby new troops were drawn directly from the village, selected by the landlord, or in the case of ‘black’ peasants by the communal assembly, and were sent to an assembly point with minimal supplies and clothing, thereafter to be taken care of by the state. The provision of recruits was to be covered by ‘mutual responsibility’: that is, if one recruit failed to report for duty or deserted, then the other households of his village had to provide a replacement for him.

Although other European countries had effected mass levies before in an emergency, Russia was the first country to institute conscription as a permanent method of raising its armed forces. From the military point of view conscription had considerable advantages. It enabled Peter to win a great victory over Charles XII at Poltava in 1709, and to follow it up by a sustained and ultimately successful military and naval campaign which ended in the capitulation of Sweden in 1721. [Further on the army, see Part 3, Chapter 2] But its effect on Russian society was to impose new obligations and to impart a new rigidity to the system of state service.

To create swiftly the industrial might which Russia needed to maintain and equip such an army, Peter proceeded in similar fashion. The empire already had a metallurgical and ordnance industry, but Peter used the power of the state to expand it tenfold, and added new branches, such as textiles to provide uniforms for his soldiers, and canvas, ropemaking and shipbuilding to create a navy from scratch. Whole new industrial districts sprang up, notably around the new capital city of St Petersburg, and in the ore-rich regions of the Urals. At first the new factories were run by the official Manufacturing College, but later they were usually sold or leased out to merchants or nobles, often provided with a monopoly.

Shortage of labour was always a great problem. Peter initially wanted to encourage the hiring of free wage labour, which he considered would promote the dignity of manufacture. But his underpopulated raw new industrial areas were uninviting, and in the end he permitted factory-owners, even when non-noble, to buy serfs. He also assigned whole villages to nearby factories to carry out the unskilled labour, while he sought foreigners to staff the administration and perform the skilled tasks. Work in the new plants was usually onerous, unpleasant and conducted in atrocious conditions; worst of all, it was protracted and regulated according to the clock, to which Russian peasants were unaccustomed. For indiscipline, factory-owners were authorized to apply all kinds of corporal punishment, confinement in irons or imprisonment. Factory serfs often complained about their conditions, and not infrequently whole villages would suddenly uproot themselves and flee in order to evade the intolerable transformation of their lives.⁶

Peter’s industrialization achieved its aims, and it laid the basis for an economic development which endured for a century or so before its drawbacks became crippling. But it did so in a way which, through heavy taxation and forced labour, actually depressed the purchasing power of much of the population, as well as debasing their civil existence and increasing their alienation from the authorities.

THE NEW STATE MACHINERY TO defray the huge costs for which the state was now responsible, Peter drastically simplified the taxation system, introducing a poll tax because that was the easiest variety of tax to assess and collect from the mass of the people. In order to ensure that everyone paid their share, he pruned down the various complicated categories into which society had hitherto been divided. Everyone became a member of either a service (sluzhiloe) estate or a tax-paying (tiagloe) one. In the former category were the nobles (boyars and service nobles amalgamated to form one estate, called the shliakhetstvo and later known as the dvorianstvo), the merchants and the clergy: they provided state service directly and hence were not liable for the poll tax. In the latter category were the other townsfolk (meshchane) and the two classes of peasants: ‘black’ ones and serfs. The tax census (podushnaia perepis’ or ‘soul census’ in Russian) took a long time to draw up, but once it was ready it provided the most detailed account of the population Russia had ever had and by its mere existence fixed each estate more firmly to its dwelling place and function. In particular, it became easier for landlords to prove their right to reclaim fugitive serfs.

The onerous and complicated new functions assumed by the state required a tighter and better-lubricated bureaucratic machinery than Russia had ever known before. It cannot be said that Peter succeeded fully in creating what was needed, but even so his innovations laid the foundations for structures that were to persist till 1917. By nature a technocrat, he delighted in things that worked, and his ambition for the Russian polity was that it should fulfil its God-given function to mobilize the resources of people and land to ensure the defence and prosperity of the realm. He viewed the state as a mechanism which, like a watch or a hydraulic pump, should be designed so that it could do its job with maximum efficiency and minimum expenditure.

This meant first of all reformulating the concept of divine right so that it would sanctify an active, interventionist state. He adopted the title of Russorum Imperator, using Latin to evoke the military glory of the First Rome, while the commonly used epithets ‘pious and gentle’ dropped out of currency. Religious processions were replaced by splendid entries through triumphal arches, with Peter cast in the personae of Mars or Hercules, pagan gods who owed their victories to their own strength and valour. After the final victory over Sweden he took the additional title of Otets otechestva, equivalent of the Latin pater patriae. The heritage of the Second Rome, Byzantium was downgraded, and the Russian saint whom Peter chose for special reverence was Aleksandr Nevskii, whose military victories had laid the basis for Russia’s claims to the Baltic coast: his remains were transferred to a monastery in the new capital city.⁷

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!’⁸

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.’⁹

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’.¹⁰ 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’.¹¹

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’.¹²

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’.¹³ 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.¹⁴

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.’¹⁵

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.¹⁶ 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.’¹⁷

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’.¹⁸

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.¹⁹

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’.²⁰

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.²¹

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.’²²

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’.²³ 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.²⁴

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.²⁵

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.²⁶

The police as ‘the soul of citizenship’: a conception which seemed less strange, perhaps, in the age of enlightened absolutism than it does now, but one which nevertheless betrays the disjointed nature of Peter’s enterprise. Freedom backed by compulsion; enlightenment bolstered by the convict camp. That was the shadow which hung over not just Peter’s reign, but over Russian civilization throughout most of the next two centuries.

Peter’s own character betrayed this dualism. The most authoritarian of Tsars, he was capable nevertheless of abandoning all the accoutrements of majesty and plunging into an ordinary tavern or workshop, to drink, talk and listen to the gossip and arguments of the common people. An apostle of the latest technology, he also valued popular culture, and would enjoy a folksong and a dance to simple melodies with the meanest of his subjects.

Strangest of all is the element of self-parody and of ritual renunciation in his personality. From time to time, he would solemnly install one of his nobles, Prince Fedor Iurevich Romodanovskii, as Tsar, take an oath of loyalty to him and promise to obey all his orders. One is reminded of Ivan IV renouncing his throne in favour of a Tatar prince. Again, during sviatki, the period between Christmas and New Year, with some of his highest officials, he would enact ‘the most foolish and drunken Synod’. The person chosen as Patriarch would parade with a naked Bacchus on his mitre, ‘his eyes provoking licentiousness’, while all present chanted a mock liturgy: ‘Let Bacchic intoxication be upon you, bring darkness all around you, and let it cause you to tumble and roll, rob you of your reason every day of your life.’²⁷

These and other burlesque entertainments suggest a striking degree of conflict inside Peter’s own personality. His rationalist view of the deity and of his own sovereignty contrasted strongly with the beliefs inculcated in him as a child, and still almost universally held in the society around him. Evidently these contradictions generated within him tensions which he felt able to master only by such paradoxical and at first sight puzzling behaviour.

To change the culture even of an elite is of course more than one ruler can accomplish in his own lifetime. But, however haphazardly, Peter had succeeded in fundamentally redirecting the manners and outlook of what under his shaping had become Russia’s ruling class. At first reluctant converts, they gradually warmed to the new cosmopolitan culture, and even embraced it enthusiastically as a mark of their social status.

In doing so, they distanced themselves from the mass of people, the peasants, townsfolk (except for a very few wealthy merchants) and clergy. In so far as they were not recruited into the army or the construction brigades of St Petersburg, ordinary people were spectators rather than participants in the ‘revolution from above’, and their feelings about it were mixed and often critical. Especially hostile were the Old Believers, already alienated by what they had seen of the secular state under Peter’s more moderate predecessors. Most of his innovations could readily be construed as insults to religion or national tradition or both: the shaving of beards, the instruction to wear ‘German’ or ‘Hungarian’ clothes, the introduction of a new calendar, the encouragement of foreign learning, the admittance of women into social life, the introduction of the ‘soul tax’, the abolition of the Patriarchate, the requirement that priests violate the secrecy of the confessional. His blasphemous orgies seemed to confirm the worst fears. Even his policy of religious toleration, which ostensibly benefited the Old Belief, demonstrated that he was intent on undermining the true faith. The apocalyptically minded decided that he was the Antichrist. Popular woodcuts circulated depicting him with the double-head eagle, the official state insignia, as two horns protruding from his head.²⁸

This was not just popular grumbling and irreverence. As under Ivan IV, many peasants fled from the new burdens. In the summer of 1707, when an armed detachment went under Prince Iu.V. Dolgorukii to look for absconded peasants on the Don, they were waylaid and massacred by some two hundred Cossacks, under their ataman, Kondratii Bulavin. This was the signal for a general campaign against official search parties, in the course of which Bulavin was elected head of all the Don Cossacks and concluded a treaty with the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Claiming the heritage of Sten’ka Razin, he advanced with his troops through the districts of Voronezh, Tambov and Borisoglebsk, gaining support from peasants for his appeal to come to the defence of ‘the house of the Holy Mother of God and the Orthodox Church against the infidel and Greek teachings which the boyars and the Germans wish to impose upon us’.²⁹ At its height the Bulavin insurrection threatened the fortresses of Azov and Taganrog, and thus the whole precarious Russian position on the Black Sea. Peter had to divert dragoons he could ill afford from the Swedish front in order to put down the revolt.

Confirmation of Peter’s diabolic status seemed to be delivered by his treatment of his son and heir Alexei. A physically frail and pious youth, Alexei was about as unlike his father as could be imagined. His mother, Evdokia, had been suspected of complicity in the strel’tsy revolt of 1698 and banned to a nunnery, something which Alexei never forgave. At the height of his personal conflict with Peter, Alexei fled abroad. He was induced to return by false promises, investigated in the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz (special investigatory chamber), and died under torture. In essence, his father murdered him, leaving the empire without an heir. Peter subsequently compounded this crime with his decree of 1722 stipulating that each ruler should appoint his own successor – something he signally failed to do himself before his sudden death in 1725.

It is no wonder that historians, Russian historians in particular, have been so divided in their opinions of Peter I. On the one hand, he did what was urgently needed if Russia was to remain an empire, which necessarily entailed becoming a European great power. At the same time, the institutions he created brought profound discord into Russian society, or perhaps it would be truer to say, enormously intensified discord which already existed. The cameralist state, imported from Germany and Sweden, with its impersonality, its functionalism, meritocratic hierarchy and strict regulation, differed fundamentally from the inherited kinship structures of Muscovy, with their personalism, informality, patriarchal hierarchy and absence of functional differentiation. His reforms took the first step towards creating a privileged ruling class, based on private landed wealth, and with a culture alien to that of the common people and of the clergy. At a time when, in other European countries, the distance between popular and elite culture was beginning to be reduced, in Russia it was immeasurably widened.

Of course, the revolution which he aimed at was far from complete at his death. Old attitudes persisted for many decades to come, and under his weaker successors aristocratic (the word ‘boyar’ now at last seems inappropriate) clans feuded for domination of the ship of state. All the same, there were enough highly-placed people who had internalized Peter’s attitudes to ensure that his reforms outlasted him. Unlike after the reign of Ivan IV, there was no disintegration, no Time of Troubles. But by the same token, there was no reaching across the great social divide. On the contrary the chasm continued to widen during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Peter had set Russia on the road to what the Marquis de Custine a century later prophesied would be ‘the revolt of the bearded against the shaven’.³⁰