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Mines and Manufacturing concentrated on production for the war effort, operating iron works and manufacture of weapons, rope, canvas, uniforms, powder, and other products. The state remained the chief producer and customer, but Peter attempted to encourage individual enterprise by offering subsidies and exemptions. Free manpower was short, however, and in 1721 industrialists were allowed to purchase serfs for their factories. New provincial institutions, based on Swedish models and created in several restructuring programs, notably in 1708-1709 and 1718-1719, were intended to rationalize recruitment and tax collection, but were among the least successful of Peter’s projects. As he said, money was the “artery of war.” A number of piecemeal fiscal measures culminated in 1724 with the introduction of the poll tax (initially 74 kopecks per annum), which replaced direct taxation based on households with assessment of individual males. Peter also encouraged foreign trade and diversified indirect taxes, which were attached to such items and services as official paper for contracts, private bathhouses, oak coffins, and beards (the 1705 beard tax). Duties from liquor, customs, and salt were profitable.
The Table of Ranks (1722) consolidated earlier legislation by dividing the service elite-army and navy officers, government and court officials-into three columns of fourteen ranks, each containing a variable number of posts. No post was supposed to be allocated to any candidate who was unqualified for the duties involved, but birth and marriage continued to confer privilege at court. The Table was intended to encourage the existing nobility to perform more efficiently, while endorsing the concept of nobles as natural leaders of society: Any commoner who attained the lowest military rank- grade 14-or civil grade 8 was granted noble status, including the right to pass it to his children.
Peter’s educational reforms, too, were utilitarian in focus, as was his publishing program, which focused on such topics as shipbuilding, navigation, architecture, warfare, geography, and history. He introduced a new simplified alphabet, the so-called civil script, for printing secular works. The best-known and most successful of Peter’s technical schools was the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (1701; from 1715, the St. Petersburg Naval Academy), which was run by British teachers. Its graduates were sent to teach in the so-called cipher or arithmetic schools (1714), but these failed to attract pupils. Priests and church schools continued to be the main suppliers of primary education, and religious books continued to sell better than secular ones. The Academy of Sciences is generally regarded as the major achievement, although it did not open until 1726 and was initially staffed entirely by foreigners. In Russia, as elsewhere, children in rural communities, where child labor was vital to the economy, remained uneducated.
THE CHURCH
The desire to deploy scarce resources as rationally as possible guided Peter’s treatment of the Orthodox Church. He abolished the patriarchate, which was left vacant when the last Patriarch died in 1700, and in 1721 replaced it with the Holy Synod, which was based on the collegiate principle and later overseen by a secular official, the Over-Procurator. The Synod’s rationale and program were set out in the Spiritual Regulation (1721). Peter siphoned off church funds as required, but he stopped short of secularizing church lands. He slimmed down the priesthood by redeploying superfluous clergymen into state service and restricting entry into monasteries, which he regarded as refuges for shirkers. Remaining churchmen accumulated various civic duties, such as keeping registers of births and deaths, running schools and hospitals, and publicizing government decrees. These measures continued seventeenth-century trends in reducing the church’s independent power, but Peter went farther by reducing its role in cultural life. Himself a dutiful Orthodox Christian who attended church regularly, he was happy for the Church to take responsibility for the saving of men’s souls, but not for it to rule their lives. His reforms were supported by educated churchmen imported from Ukraine.
ST. PETERSBURG AND THE NEW CULTURE
The city of St. Petersburg began as an island fort at the mouth of the Neva river on land captured from the Swedes in 1703. From about 1712 it came to be regarded as the capital. In Russia’s battle for international recognition, St. Petersburg was much more than a useful naval base and port. It was a clean sheet on which Peter could construct a microcosm of his New Russia. The Western designs and decoration of palaces, government buildings, and churches, built in stone by hired foreign architects according to a rational plan, and the European fashions that all Russian townspeople were forced to wear, were calculated to make foreigners
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feel that they were in Europe rather than in Asia. The city became a “great window recently opened in the north through which Russia looks on Europe” (Francesco Algarotti, 1739). Peter often referred to it as his “paradise,” playing on the associations with St. Peter as well as expressing his personal delight in a city built on water. The central public spaces enjoyed amenities such as street lighting and paving and public welfare was supervised by the Chief of Police, although conditions were less salubrious in the backstreets. Nobles resented being uprooted from Moscow to this glorified building site. Noblewomen were not exempt. They were wrenched from their previously sheltered lives in the semi-secluded women’s quarters or terem and ordered to abandon their modest, loose robes and veils in favor of Western low cut gowns and corsets and to socialize and drink with men. Some historians have referred to the “emancipation” of women under Peter, but it is doubtful whether this was the view of those involved.
PETER’S VISION AND METHODS
Peter was an absolute ruler, whose great height (six foot seven inches) and explosive temper must have intimidated those close to him. His portraits, the first thoroughly Westernized Russian images painted or sculpted from life, were embellished with Imperial Roman, allegorical, military, and naval motifs to underline his power. Yet he sought to deflect his subjects’ loyalty from himself to the state, exhorting them to work for the common good. A doer rather than a thinker, he lacked formal education and the patience for theorizing. Soviet historians favored the image of the Tsar-Carpenter, emphasizing the fourteen trades that Peter mastered, of which his favorites were shipbuilding and wood turning. He also occasionally practiced dentistry and surgery. Ironically, Peter often behaved in a manner that confirmed foreign prejudices that Russia was a barbaric country. Abroad he frequently offended his hosts with his appalling manners, while Western visitors to Russia were perplexed by his court, which featured dwarfs, giants, and human “monsters” (from his Cabinet of Curiosities), compulsory drinking sessions, which armed guards prevented guests prevented from leaving, and weird ceremonies staged by the “All-Mad, All-Jesting, All- Drunken Assembly,” which, headed by the Prince-Pope, parodied religious rituals. Throughout his life Peter maintained a mock court headed by a mock tsar known as Prince Caesar, who conferred promotions on “Peter Mikhailov” or “Peter Alexeyev,” as Peter liked to be known as he worked his way through the ranks of the army and navy.
One of the functions of Peter’s mock institutions was to ridicule the old ways. Peter constantly lamented his subjects’ reluctance to improve themselves on their own initiative. As he wrote in an edict of 1721 to replace sickles with more efficient scythes: “Even though something may be good, if it is new our people will not do it.” He therefore resorted to force. In Russia, where serfdom was made law as recently as 1649, the idea of a servile population was not new, but under Peter servitude was extended and intensified. The army and navy swallowed up tens of thousands of men. State peasants were increasingly requisitioned to work on major projects. Previously free persons were transferred to the status of serfs during the introduction of the poll tax. Peter also believed in the power of rules, regulations, and statutes, devised “in order that everyone knows his duties and no one excuses himself on the grounds of ignorance.” In 1720, for example, he issued the General Regulation, a “regulation of regulations” for the new government apparatus. Not only the peasants, but also the nobles, found life burdensome. They were forced to serve for life and to educate their sons for service.
ASSOCIATES AND OPPONENTS
Despite his harsh methods, Peter was supported by a number of men, drawn from both the old Muscovite
