PETER THE GREAT

The impact of Peter the Great upon Muscovy was like that of a peasant hitting a horse with his fist. Muscovy bore many of the marks permanently and henceforward she became known as Russia. Yet his reforms, for all their importance, did not create a new form of state: they were to a large extent the very rapid and energetic extension of ideas and practices already to be found in the generation before him. The old and the new continued to live on, in part conflicting, in part coalescing. Tsarism in his lifetime received a new stamp owing to his wholly exceptional character and abilities, but its functioning remained as before dependent upon different sec-tions of the landed class and the machinery of government. Peter did not introduce the idea of the service state; he pushed it to extremes, enforced compulsory service in the army, navy, and government on the landowners and himself set the example as the first servant of the state. He wrote of himself with full justification: 'I have not spared and I do not spare my life for my fatherland and people.'

Peter was repellent in his brutality, coarseness and utter disregard of human life; but he was mightily propellent, through his ever-flaming energy and will-power, his insatiable curiosity and love of experiment, his refusal to accept any defeat and his capacity to launch, however crudely and over-hastily at first, great schemes on an immense, however wasteful, scale. From earliest childhood his over-riding personal interest was the art of war, by sea as well as by land; but he understood it in the widest sense as involving the full utilization of the human and material resources of his country. He was at war for twenty-eight consecutive years, from 1695. He began when he was twenty-four; when he finally had peace he was fifty-two and had little more than a year to live.

Almost all Peter's reforms were born of military and naval

requirements. Russia must be westernized in order to ensure the 'two necessary things in government, namely order and defence'. His task was, again, as he himself put it, to convert his subjects from 'beasts into human beings', from 'children into adults'. His strongest modern critics allow that he was inspired by devotion to Russia, not by personal ambition, and that he aimed at inculcating by example and precept rational ideas of citizenship in terms of efficient, and therefore educated, service to the state, in contrast with blind service to a sacrosanct ruler throned far away on high in the hallowed veneration of Muscovite ceremonial.

His reforms until about 1715 were imposed piecemeal, chaotically and (as he himself admitted) far too hastily, in dependence on the urgent pressure of the moment. He was constantly scrapping or remodelling this or that portion of his own handiwork in frantic search for more recruits, more labour, more revenue, more munitions. In his last dozen years, when war was less onerous and his contacts with the West were closer, the peremptory edicts, often conflicting with each other, gave way to systematic, carefully elaborated legislation that remoulded state and church alike. His brutal violence, the enormous demands that he exacted and his external flouting of national ways and prejudices supplied fertile ground for opposition. He had to crush in blood four serious risings, and he condemned to death his own son and heir, Alexis, on the ground of his being the ringleader of reaction (Q18). In actuality Alexis was a passive creature who was only hoping for his father's death in terrified fear of his own. The opposition was leaderless; and as well it was too heterogeneous; almost all interests in Russia were divided between supporters and opponents of Peter.

He aimed at transforming tsarism into a European kind of absolute monarchy, and to a considerable extent he succeeded. Russia was never the same again, even though the pace was too hot and there was regress after his death. He declared himself to be 'an absolute monarch who does not have to answer for any of his actions to anyone in the world; but he has power and authority for the purpose of governing his states and lands according to his will and wise decision as a Christian sovereign'. This version of enlightened despotism, typically enough, appeared in Peter's new code for the army (1716). The creation of a national standing army on Western models was one of the most fundamental of his legacies, and the links of tsarism with military power and the military spirit were henceforth knitted even more closely than before. One external sign is significant. Peter himself almost always appeared as a soldier or sailor (when not dressed as a mechanic) and all succeeding emperors did likewise; his predecessors (when not hunting) had usually appeared in hieratic pomp, half tsar, half high-priest.

No tsar has made such a lasting impression on Russia as Peter, whether in his works or his personality. He was an unheard-of tsar-for some no tsar at all, but Antichrist. He brought the tsar to earth and entwined himself in the hopes and fears and groans of his subjects as a dark and terrible force, rooting up the past, putting to rout the Swedes; as a ruler such as they had never conceived before, to be seen throughout the length and breadth of the land, immense in stature, with his tireless stride that was more of a run and his huge calloused hands of which he was so proud; a ruler who went into battle as a bombardier, who wielded an axe as well as any of his subjects, who could kill a man with a single blow of his fist-and on occasion did. He made Russia conscious of great destiny, and ever since Europe and Asia have had to reckon with her.

(From Survey of Russian History, by B. H. Sumner)