been Peter’s principal aim. To achieve this aim Peter built a European-style army and a navy based in the Baltic. The war also served as a major stimulus to Peter’s reforms.
The initial phase of the war (1700-1709) was marked by Swedish successes. Peter’s attempt to capture the port of Narva in Swedish-held Estonia ended in catastrophic defeat on November 30, 1700, at the hands of Charles XII, king of Sweden. The defeat meant the destruction of most of Peter’s new army, which he then had to rebuild. Fortunately, Charles chose to move south into Poland, hoping to unseat August II from the throne of Poland and expand Swedish influence. In 1706 Charles succeeded in forcing August II to surrender and leave the war and to recognize Stanislaw Leszczynski, a Swedish puppet, as king of Poland. In 1707 Charles moved east through Poland toward Russia, apparently hoping to both defeat and overthrow Peter and replace him with a more compliant tsar from among the Russian boyars. Charles also managed to convince Ivan Mazepa, the Het-man of the Ukrainian Cossacks, to join him against Peter, but in Russia itself there was no move in favor of Charles. Instead, the Russian army retreated before the Swedes, acquiring experience and mounting ever more effective resistance. Charles was forced south into Ukraine during the fall of
GREAT NORTHERN WAR
The Battle of Poltava in 1709 marked the turning point in the Great Northern War. © BETTMANN/CORBIS 1708, and Peter’s defeat of the Swedish relief column at Lesnaya (October 9, 1708) left him without additional food and equipment.
The battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709) proved the turning point of the war. The Swedish army suffered heavy casualties and fled the field southwest toward the Dnieper River. When they reached the banks with the Russians in hot pursuit, they found too few boats to carry them across and had to surrender. Only Charles, his staff, and some of his personal guard escaped into Ottoman territory. Thus the way was clear for Peter to occupy the Baltic provinces and southeast Finland, then a Swedish possession, in 1710.
By the end of 1710 Peter had achieved his principal war aims, for these conquests secured the approaches to St. Petersburg. In 1711 the outbreak of war with the Turks provided an unwelcome distraction, and he was able to turn his attention to the Northern War only in 1712. His allies now included the restored August II of Poland-Saxony, as well as Denmark and Prussia. Russian troops moved into northern Germany to support these allies, and Sweden’s German possessions, Bremen, Stralsund, and Stettin, fell by 1714. In 1713 Peter managed to occupy all of Finland, which he hoped to use as a bargaining chip in the inevitable peace negotiations. Charles XII, who returned to Sweden from Turkey in 1714, would not give up. Ignoring Sweden’s rapidly deteriorating economic situation, he refused to acknowledge defeat. Peter’s small but decisive naval victory over the Swedish fleet at Hang? peninsula on the Finnish coast in 1714 preserved Russian control over Finland and allowed Peter to harass the Swedish coast. A joint Russo-Danish project to invade Sweden in 1716 came to nothing, and the war continued until 1721 with a series of Russian raids along the Swedish coast. The death of Charles XII in 1718 even prolonged the war, for Great Britain, worried over Russian influence in the Baltic region and northern Germany, began to support Sweden, but it was too late. In 1721 the treaty of Nystad put an end to the war, allowing Russia to keep southeast Finland (the town of Viborg), In-gria, Estonia, and the province of Livonia (today
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southern Estonia and Latvia north of the Dvina river).
Peter’s victory in the Great Northern War radically altered the balance of power in northern and eastern Europe. The defeat of Sweden and the loss of most of its overseas territories other than Finland and Stralsund, as well as the collapse of Swedish absolutism after 1718, rendered Sweden a minor power once again. The events of the war revealed for the first time decisively the political and military weakness of Poland. Russia, by contrast, had defeated the formerly hegemonic power of the region, recovered Ingria, acquired the Baltic provinces and part of Finland, and founded St. Petersburg as a new city and new capital. These acquisitions gave Russia a series of seaports to support both trade and a naval presence in the Baltic Sea, as well as a shorter route to Western Europe. Victory in the war justified Peter’s military, administrative, and economic reforms and the Westernization of Russian culture. It also enormously reinforced his personal prestige and power. See also: LESNAYA, BATTLE OF; PETER I; NARVA, BATTLES OF; POLTAVA, BATTLE OF; SWEDEN, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hatton, Ragnhild. (1968). Charles the Twelfth. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Frost, Robert I. (2000). The Northern Wars: War, State, and Society in Northeastern Europe. Harlow, UK: Longman.
GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR See WORLD WAR II.
At the accession of Alexander II in 1855, some twenty-two million Russian peasants were serfs; their status was like slavery. “State peasants” were similarly constrained. In 1861, serfdom was abolished. Other reforms followed. Together they are called the “great reforms.” How did they emerge from a conservative regime? How did they relate one to another? What was their impact on Russia’s development? The explanations most often given for the abolition of serfdom do not work. Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War left the regime discredited and impoverished, ill positioned to challenge the serfholding elite. The regime believed that peasant rebellions were more likely a result of reform. It expected economic growth if serfdom were abolished, but dreaded economic disruption. It understood that serfdom was outmoded, but it seemed to work. When, in August 1857, a secret committee pronounced that “not only the peasants but even the Government itself is not prepared for a general emancipation” of the serfs, Alexander expressed satisfaction.
Three months later, the government began to reform serfdom. The turnabout occurred because serfdom was weak. The serfholders were dependent upon the state, to which they had mortgaged two-thirds of their serfs and on which they relied to keep the serfs subordinate. They had no political experience. Most of them shared a culture oriented to western Europe, where serfdom had disappeared. No articulate voice in Russia could praise serfdom. Thanks to censorship, nothing critical or supportive of serfdom, appeared in print. Russia had no Garrison, but also no Calhoun; serfdom had no ideology.
The breakthrough took the form of directives to the governor-general of three northwestern provinces. These incoherent documents were the by-product of an abandoned initiative, but their publication committed the government to the reform of serfdom. And they contained the germ of a resolution to the key problem. The government believed that a noble’s land was inalienable private property; peasants believed the land was theirs because they tilled it. Freedom without land would, from a peasant perspective, be a monstrous injustice. To give privately-owned land to the peasants would, from an elite perspective, be no less monstrous. The directives reaffirmed the serfholders’ property rights, but provided peasant households with the use of allotments of land.
Ostensibly, the nobility of each province was to participate in drafting the reform. The government learned that there was no flim-flam the nobility would not tolerate. It made a series of promises to the nobility and withdrew or ignored each one. The nobles barely responded, confident because most top positions in government were held by men as hostile to reform as they were.
The abolition legislation was not created by these dignitaries, but by a group of zealous reformers
GREAT REFORMS
assembled in an Editorial Commission. They had enormous energy and guile. They managed to convince Alexander that their critics were actually challenging his autocratic prerogatives.
The legislative process was epitomized when the commission’s draft came before the Council of State in early 1861. The council was composed of Alexander’s friends and confidants. It voted down each section of the draft by large margins. The members were counting on the emperor’s sympathy and his distrust of reformers. These dignitaries could not, however, come up with a coherent alternative. Furthermore, the council was not a legislature. With each section of the draft, the emperor used his prerogative to endorse the minority position, and the Editorial Commission’s version became law without significant change. The result was a cautious reform that was nonetheless much more radical than anyone in authority had contemplated.
