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Peter the Great

Дата публикации: 20 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) FAMOUS RUSSIANS →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1190295706


Peter the Great

Also known as: Peter I, Czar of Russia, Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, Peter I, Tsar of Russia, Peter, the Great, Peter I, Peter, Peter I, the Great, Czar Peter I, the Great, Peter I of Russia, Emperor of Russia Peter I the Great

Born: 1672
Died: 1725
Occupation: tsar

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"I have great bundles of grain but I have no mill and there is not enough water close by to build one. But there is water enough at a distance if only I shall have time to build a canal, but the length of my life is uncertain. Therefore, I build the mill first and have only given the order to build the canal, which will better force my successors to bring water [to put the mill to use]. PETER THE GREAT


Tsar and emperor of Russia, who was the first ruler of a non-Western nation to appreciate the implications of the growing power of the West and who attempted to modernize his country to cope with it.



BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Peter the Great and his sister Natalia were the children of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich Romanov (1645-76) by his second marriage to Natalia Naryshkin. By his first wife, Maria Miloslavsky, however, Alexis still had four surviving children out of a total of 14: Theodore, John, Sophia, and Maria. Upon his death, the throne passed to Theodore, and the widowed Natalia moved to the nearby village of Preobrazhenskoye with her children. Theodore had no male heir, however, and when he died in 1682 the hostility between the families of Alexis's successive wives came to a head. The Miloslavskys wanted John, another son who suffered from poor health and bad eyesight and who appears to have been epileptic, to succeed his father; the Naryshkins, however, pressed for Peter, who, though only ten, was already a bright and promising youth. A massive revolt of the elite corps known as the streltsy (musketeers) led to the bloody slaughter of a number of Naryshkins and their supporters, an event that Peter witnessed and which could only have had a baleful effect on his character and development. The patriarch of the Russian Church then engineered an agreement that provided for John and Peter reigning jointly under the regency of Sophia. As a result of her own intrigues, Sophia fell in 1689, however, and when John died in 1696, leaving his half-brother sole ruler, Peter's reign may be said to have begun.

It is often said that Peter's education was deliberately neglected by Sophia to dull his ability to rule. As a matter of fact, he received a good if traditional Orthodox upbringing. Heavily dominated by the Bible, it also included choir-singing, an activity that Peter enjoyed throughout his life. Playing at soldiering was his chief boyhood occupation at Preobrazhenskoye, where he built a fort and formed his own regiment from among his playmates, and where a chance discovery of an English boat nearby led to his lifelong preoccupation with the navy. About 1690, when he was still 18, Peter began to spend increasing amounts of time in the so-called "German" or foreign quarter, which he had to pass whenever he visited Moscow. This was a walled area adjoining the capital where lived the foreign specialists brought into Muscovy in increasing numbers all through the 17th century. Here, away from the stuffiness of the Muscovite court, Peter consorted freely with Western Europeans, learned Dutch and German, and was able to study technological advances; here also he could satisfy his tastes for mechanical contraptions, strong drink, and women, forging lasting links with technical experts, artisans and craftsmen which he clung to throughout his life.


He Embarks on Visits to the West

Peter began his reign by taking a direct part in the current Russian war against the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the goal of which was to secure a Russian port on the northern coast of the Black Sea. The war was a temporary success and for a time the Russians acquired Azov near modern Rostov-on-the-Don. Although victorious against the Turks, the war had made Peter aware of the deficiencies of the Russian army and this led him to embark upon a personal visit to the West in order to learn for himself whatever was necessary to bring Russia to the level that her size and potential might warrant. Despite the obvious dangers in leaving his own country, Peter set out incognito on his 250-man "Grand Embassy" that was to spend more than a year abroad. Forced to return at the outset to put down a revolt of the streltsy in which Sophia was deeply involved, Peter clapped his half-sister into a convent and, undaunted, set out once again. Traveling through various German states, he settled in Holland for four months mastering carpentry and shipbuilding. From Holland, he went to England, where he lived for several weeks at Deptford, south of London, receiving a doctorate from Oxford University, visiting Windsor Castle and Hampton Court Palace, and seeing as much as he could of every novelty that the country had to offer. Upon his return to Russia, he brought with him hundreds of technicians and other specialists of every European nationality. Bullying his nobles into shaving their beards and adopting Western dress, he forced them to allow their women out of their traditional seclusion and otherwise Europeanized court life. Seriously outmatched at the Battle of Narva (1700) at the opening of his war against Sweden (then under the rule of the dynamic wunderkind Charles XII), wherein the largest nation in Europe was defeated by one of the smallest, Peter began his first reforms in earnest; in 1702, he extended an open invitation to Western technicians, soldiers, artisans, and craftsmen to enter Russia at will and began sending talented sons of the Russian nobility to study abroad.

Peter's reforms were accomplished in a haphazard manner with no overall plan behind them. On the contrary, he had but one specific goal: to make his country a great power commensurate with its size and potential so that it might forever be safe from foreign invasion or domination. But to achieve this goal, Peter found that certain prerequisites were necessary. To make Russia a great power, Peter needed a modern army, but to create a modern army he needed vast sums of money; to get more money meant the reform of the system of taxation; to reform this system required an improved administrative system; a modern administration required educated administrators capable of managing public affairs in a modern way; to provide such people required a European educational system, and, since there were few teachers in Russia and no means of training any in the skills that needed to be taught, foreign teachers had to be brought in, which, naturally, meant further westernization. A better army also required an industrial base to make Russia independent of imports of foreign arms, while the development of industry, though generating additional taxes, required capital to get it started. Peter's problems were monumental, and it is to his everlasting credit that he was able to accomplish anywhere near as much as he did. Not the least of his problems were the incredible backwardness of the Muscovite state that he had inherited, the sheer weight of inertia that pervaded the country, the lack of qualified people who understood his vision, and the enormous opposition that met him at every turn.

When Peter came to the throne, the Russian army consisted of some 150,000 men badly trained, poorly equipped, and poorly disciplined. The core of the army was a medieval feudal cavalry, long in decay, and the streltsy, a Western-style elite corps very inferior to its Western counterparts. When he returned from his first trip abroad, Peter reorganized the army along Western lines, abolishing the streltsy and turning his boyhood regiment into the new elite "Preobrazhensky Guard" consisting of two battalions totaling 4,000 men. The bulk of the new army, however, consisted of a force of 200,000 commoners based on a periodic conscription that took one out of every 20 men in the country and from which only the clergy and merchants were excused (the latter paying 200 rubles for their exemption). Every conscript was required to serve from age 15 to disability, the older men being used to garrison the towns. In addition, Peter added a force of 100,000 irregular troops consisting of Cossacks and Mongol nomads. A particular passion of Peter was the navy, which he personally created for the first time in Russian history. By the time of his death, Peter's Baltic Fleet consisted of 800 ships served by 20,000 men, though a decade later, as a result of neglect, only about 15 of the larger ships were still in service. All of these military undertakings cost money and lives. The former Peter had to deal with; the latter counted but little in Russia.

By 1701, the annual expenses of the army amounted to 2 million rubles out of an annual state income of 3 million; by 1724, 4 million was being spent annually on the army alone and another million on the navy. Between 1701 and 1708, expenses amounted to 80% of the annual budget. To pay for all of this, Peter abolished the earlier tax on each household and instituted a "soul" or head tax, levying additional taxes on inns, bath houses, mills, fishing operations, beehives, beards, coffins, stamps, and non-Christian marriages. An enormous bureaucracy encumbered with miles of "red tape" was established to supervise the administration of these taxes, a bureaucracy that grew without cease, survived the Revolution of 1917, and continued to grow thereafter. The government also established certain trade monopolies whose profits poured solely into the imperial coffers: salt, tobacco, tar, fats, fish oil, and caviar.

Major economic reforms were found to be necessary to increase the tax yield through increasing prosperity. The concept of mercantilism was very important to Peter, and he worked hard to get Russia into a position where she exported more than she took in. Entrepreneurs of every kind received encouragement. Armenians, for example, were granted religious freedom to encourage them to settle in southern Russia where they established both viticulture (the wine industry) and sericulture (the silk industry) in the tsar's domains. Horsebreeding, textiles, mining, and tobacco raising also were encouraged, as was the building of roads and canals. All such undertakings were hindered, however, by the lack of labor, the masses being tied to the land as serfs on the great estates of the Crown, the Church, and the nobility. Peter thus had to pry people from this frozen layer by allowing industrialists to own serfs without land. Such industrial serfs were quickly indistinguishable from common slaves and Peter solved this embarrassment by ordering the term for slave (kholop) stricken from the law books. By 1725, Russia was exporting 2.5 million rubles worth of goods and importing only 1.5 million--less than Peter had hoped for but a good beginning.

To manage these and other reforms, Peter soon realized that his government required a total overhauling of its administrative machinery. Drawing upon Sweden as his model--while overlooking completely that Russia was not Sweden--Peter introduced the collegial system whereby the government machinery was made up of committees called "colleges" that answered collectively to the tsar. To supervise these colleges and to run Russia while he was away traveling or at war, Peter established an appointed senate. Although the colleges were abandoned a century later for the more modern system of ministries, the senate lasted until 1917 by which time its function had narrowed to that of a quasi-supreme court. Both the senate and the colleges were weakened in Peter's time by the ignorance, incompetence, and corruption of their members, but they were a considerable improvement over the chaotic Muscovite system of 40 departments with ill-defined and overlapping jurisdictions that had obtained before his reign.


Peter Restructures Russian Society

In Peter's time, Russian society consisted of (1) titled nobles, among whom the various levels and the various ethnic elements tended to become fused into one self-seeking, self-serving class: the Russian nobility; (2) non-noble, untitled landowners, the gentry, who swelled the government service; (3) the clergy; (4) merchants (chiefly foreigners); (5) serfs, and (6) slaves, the last two of which, as we have seen, fused into one downtrodden underclass. Upon this structure Peter now imposed his table of ranks, a system of three pyramids--the civil service, the military and the Church--consisting of 14 ranks each. All Russians were expected to serve in one of the ranks except the serfs, the clergy, the doctors, traders, bankers, artisans and craftsmen, and the merchant class. Through this system, which, with modifications, remained in force until 1917, the nobility and gentry were converted into a managerial class in which all were exposed to three years of compulsory education, all had to start at the bottom, and from all of whom 25 years of service were required. Anyone who reached the eighth rank could become a noble; at the attainment of rank six this nobiliary passed to one's heirs. Peter also introduced Western nobiliary titles and took the unprecedented step of actually creating new princes. Foreigners were given complete freedom to trade in the Empire and could serve the state if they wanted to, receiving higher pay than Russians. In return, they received freedom of worship and the right to special courts, a concession borrowed from Ottoman Turkey. As always, the peasantry bore the brunt of the new order. After 1700, the nobles began to abrogate the traditional rights of their serfs, and the government, needing the nobles' support, did nothing to stop this. Serfs were sold without the land, families were broken up in the process, and the status of the common people soon became no better than that of the contemporary African slaves in the colonial American south.

Ivan III (1462-1505) had warred to unify Russia and to break free of the Mongol yoke; Ivan IV (1533-84) had conquered the Mongols and warred unsuccessfully to acquire a warm water port. In the 17th century, Russia expanded westward at the expense of Poland, acquiring the Ukraine in the process, and then expanded to the Pacific and to the frontiers of China. Following upon all this, Peter's foreign policy may be reduced to three simple goals: (1) reaching the Baltic Sea; (2) reaching the Black Sea; and (3) expanding southward at the expense of Iran. Ultimately, only the first of these thrusts was successful, though it took the 21-year Swedish or Northern War to complete it. Much territory was then seized from Iran but at a horrible cost in human life, and Peter had to abandon these conquests almost as soon as they had been acquired. Azov, too, was lost to Turkey and a successful thrust to the Black Sea was left for Catherine the Great (1762-96) to achieve.

Ever in search of competent men to share his vision and execute his will, Peter displayed none of the traditional Muscovite bigotry towards foreigners and individuals not of the Orthodox Faith. He appointed a Jew, Kafirov, to be Russia's first foreign minister because of his skills in language, and welcomed such foreigners as the Swiss Lefort, the Scot Bruce, the Englishman Perry, the Armenian Israel Ori, who was Russia's first ambassador to Iran, and an Ethiopian who became the ancestor of the poet Pushkin. His chief collaborator, however, was the rascally Alexander Menshikov, a wily Russian adventurer of humble origin, who lined his pockets in Peter's service but who remained his confident and drinking partner, serving him faithfully to the end of Peter's life.

Peter's foreign policy also included an elaborate matchmaking program. In the past, Russian rulers had married only Russians and no European house was willing either to take a Russian bride or to send its daughters to marry a Romanov groom, the dynasty being considered upstart, the country barbarous, the climate appalling, and the language impossible. Above all, the Romanovs were Greek Orthodox, and Catholics and Protestant rulers alike were reluctant to agree to their daughters' changing their faith. Peter's astonishing exploits, however, made the Romanovs seem more respectable and the other problems in regard to matrimonial alliances less onerous.

Although Peter could never get the great houses of Europe to take a Romanov bride, failing miserably in his attempts to marry his daughter Elizabeth to Louis XV, he did succeed in marrying his niece, the future Empress Anne (1730-40), daughter of John V, to the Duke of Courland; her sister Catherine to the Duke of Mecklenburg, their infant grandson reigning briefly as John VI (1740-41), and his own daughter Anne to the Duke of Holstein, their son reigning briefly as Peter III (1761-62). Peter was equally unsuccessful in securing a brilliant match for his son, Alexis, having to be content with Charlotte, a princess of the German house of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttle, who died in childbirth.


He Crowns Catherine as Empress

As a youth of 21, Peter had dutifully married a boyar princess, Eudoxia Lopukhin, and duly sired two sons, but he rarely lived with his wife and took a number of mistresses. In time, he settled down with an illiterate Lithuanian peasant girl of dubious reputation who had previously been Menshikov's mistress and by whom Peter eventually had 12 children. Hard-drinking but good-natured, Catherine was reputed to have been the only one who could calm Peter during his ferocious and unpredictable rages, which could often be dangerous to those around him. In 1712, Peter scandalized his court and startled Europe by marrying Catherine. In 1721, he crowned her his empress, and after his death she was recognized as his heir. In time, their daughter would rule as Empress Elizabeth (1741-61).

Peter's original heir was Alexis, his elder son by Eudoxia. Typically, Peter ignored the boy, leaving him to be raised by his old-fashioned mother and her conservative cronies until he was old enough to be of use to him. By then, however, Alexis had become a weakling and, under Peter's direct tutelage, came to manifest all of his father's vices and none of his virtues. A drunkard and a wastrel, he became the locus where the old guard gathered and around whom the general opposition to Peter began to coalesce. Disgusted with Alexis and discovering him at the center of a plot, Peter subjected him to torture after which he shortly died. Peter then intended the throne to pass to Alexis's son, Peter, but his throne passed to his second wife and Peter II did not succeed him until 1730.

Reputed to have been 6'7" in height, Peter the Great is believed to have suffered from a mild form of a glandular disorder known to cause gigantism. Highly intelligent and physically strong, but erratic, hot-tempered and given to drinking and debauchery, he was devoted to his duty as he saw it. Dynamic, ambitious, ruthless, brutal, hard driving, hard working, and concerned above all for the aggrandizement of his country, Peter brooked no opposition. He was free-thinking in religious matters, uncomfortable with ceremony and exceedingly down-to-earth. In keeping with his character, Peter died at 52 from the effects of having dived into icy waters to save a boatload of common sailors who were about to capsize.

Peter inherited the weak, backward, decaying, essentially Asiatic state of Muscovy on the fringes of Europe and left it the Russian Empire, one of the great European powers whose articulate upper classes were fully participating in Western civilization. For all this, however, his achievement was not quite as world-shaking as it is often made out. First of all, it is a misunderstanding to say that he wanted to "westernize" Russia. Had he sought westernization for its own sake, for example, he would surely have abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet and reformed the Russian Church. Had Ottoman Turkey or China been more advanced than Western Europe there is little doubt that Peter would have drawn his models from them. Second, a considerable amount of westernization of Russia had been going on throughout the 17th century. Some nobles were wearing Western dress long before Peter, and his half-sister Sophia was well educated for her time. Third, many of his reforms were only on paper and many died on the vine. Fourth, most of them were ad hoc reforms based not on any philosophy, conviction, or prior plan but simply introduced as the need arose.

Peter did nothing to alter the traditional role of the ruler of Russia. The tsar answered to God alone; his ministers, and indeed his entire administration, were simply incarnations of the tsar's will. Peter made and unmade laws as he saw fit; outside authority, apart from his delegation, simply did not exist. The Russian church was placed squarely under the tsar's thumb. Peter allowed the patriarchate to remain vacant after 1700 and, in 1721, abolished it, placing the church under the governance of a council of bishops called the "holy synod" headed by a layman of his own choosing. There was no cabinet, each minister or college answering directly to the tsar; no consultation of the people was ever undertaken, and there was not even the pretense of an advisory body let alone a parliament or legislature of any kind. Peter thus introduced the curious idea that one could establish a modern state on the order of England or France while continuing to rule it as if it were Turkey, China, or Iran, a naive notion that the tsars were unable to relinquish until the very end.

Nevertheless, it must be said that Peter the Great, with little support and considerable opposition, dragged Russia forcibly into the 18th century, and there has never been a time since his day that affairs in Europe could be conducted without the wishes and policies of Russia being taken into consideration. The true depth of the westernization and modernization of Russia, however, was only achieved after his death when, for a variety of reasons, one ruler, either Western (Peter III, Catherine the Great), pro-Western (Elizabeth), or Western-oriented (Anne) followed another until the old Muscovite state was left too far in the past to be remembered and there was no turning back from the road upon which Peter had set his homeland.


-- Contributed by Robert H. Hewsen, Professor of History, Glassboro State College, Glassboro, New Jersey


PERSONAL INFORMATION
Name variations: (Russian) Piotr Alekseevich Romanov. Born in Moscow on May 30, 1672; died in St. Petersburg on January 28, 1725, the fifth ruler of the Romanov dynasty; son of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich Romanov and Natalia Naryshkin; married: Eudoxia Lopukhin (a Russian princess), 1689 (marriage repudiated in 1703); married: Catherine Skavronsky (an illiterate Lithuanian peasant who had been his mistress for several years), 1712; children: (first marriage) two sons; (second marriage) 12; (only two daughters, Elizabeth and Anna, survived him).

CHRONOLOGY
1672 Peter the Great born
1682 Became co-tsar with his half-brother John (Ivan) V
1696 John V died; Peter became sole ruler; Turks defeated at Azov
1699 Peter's reforms began
1700-21 Great Northern War with Sweden
1700 Russians defeated by Swedes at Battle of Narva
1703 St. Petersburg founded
1708 Swedes invaded Russia; Russia defeated Swedes at Battle of Lesnaia
1709 Swedes defeated by Russians at Battle of Poltava
1710-11 Second Turkish war; Russians defeated by Turks
1711 Senate and ten colleges established
1714 Russian navy defeated Swedes at Hangö
1715 First Naval Academy opened
1717 Government administrative "colleges" opened
1721 Peace of Nystadt ended Northern War; Peter abolished the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church; took title "emperor" and "the Great"
1722 Peter's Persian war began; Table of Ranks established; new law of succession
1724 Peter crowned Catherine "empress"
1725 Peter the Great died


FURTHER READINGS

Kliuchevskii, V. O. Peter the Great. Random House, 1963.


Schuyler, E. Peter the Great: Emperor of Russia. Scribner, 1884.


Vernadsky, G., et al., eds. A Source Book for Russian History. 3 vols. Yale University Press, 1972.


Waliszewski, Kazimierz. Peter the Great. D. Appleton, 1897.


Anderson, M.S. Peter the Great. Thames & Hudson, 1978.


Massie, Robert. Peter the Great: His Life and Work. Knopf, 1980.


Sumner, B. H. Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia. English Universities Press, 1950, Collier, 1962.


Troyat, H. Peter the Great. Dutton, 1987.

Опубликовано на Порталусе 20 сентября 2007 года

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