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The Reforms of the Peter the Great

© Alexander Batyukov

The Reforms of Peter the Great

By dint of his driving energy and ruthlessness, PETER I (r. 1682-1725) transformed Russia and brought it into the concert of European nations. A struggle of almost 20 years with CHARLES XII of Sweden (1700-21; ) and wars with Ottoman Turkey (1710-11) and Persia (1722-23) radically changed Russia's international position (symbolized by Peter's assumption of the new title of emperor in 1721). By the Treaty of Nystad (1721) with Sweden, Russia acquired the Baltic province of LIVONIA (including Estonia and most of Latvia), giving it a firm foothold on the Baltic Sea and a direct relationship with western Europe. In the south gains were modest, but they marked the beginning of a Russian imperial offensive on the Black and Caspian seas.

These territorial gains, requiring much effort and great expenditures of labor and resources, forced Peter to transform the institutional framework of the state and to attempt a restructuring of society as well. The central administration was streamlined along functional lines: a set of colleges on the European model displaced the prikazy, and a senate of appointed officials replaced the boyar duma; the church was put under direct state administration with the abolition of the patriarchate and the establishment of a Holy Synod (1721) of appointed ecclesiastical members supervised by a lay official. A navy was created, and the army was reorganized along professional Western lines, the peasantry furnishing the recruits and nobility the officers. The local administration, however, remained a weak link in the institutional chain, although it maintained the vast empire in obedience. The peasantry was subjected to compulsory labor (as in the building of the new capital, SAINT PETERSBURG, begun in 1703) and to military service, and every individual adult male peasant was assessed with a head, or poll, tax. By these measures the state severed the last legal ties of the peasants to the land and transformed them into personal serfs, virtually chattel, who could be moved and sold at will.

Other classes of society were not immune from state service either. Compulsory, lifelong service was imposed on the nobility, and their status was made dependent on ranks earned in military or administrative office (the Table of Ranks of 1722 also provided for automatic ennoblement of commoners through service). State service required education, and Peter introduced compulsory secular, Westernized schooling for the Russian nobleman. While resistance to compulsory service gradually forced its relaxation, education became an internalized value for most nobles who were culturally Westernized by the mid-18th century.

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