by Will Durant
Most of the clergy resigned themselves to this Russian Reformation, which, again like that of Henry VIII, left doctrine unchanged. Some Raskolniki (dissenters) denounced Peter as Antichrist, and urged the people to refuse him obedience or taxes. He had the leaders of this rebellion arrested, and dealt with them after his usual fashion: some were knouted and banished to Siberia, some were imprisoned for life, one died of torture, two were slowly burned to death. 19
For the rest, Peter was abreast of the West in religious toleration. He protected the Raskolniki from persecution as long as they abstained from politics. In St. Petersburg, to encourage foreign trade, he allowed Calvinist, Lutheran, and Catholic churches to be built on the Nevski Prospekt, which came to be called the “Prospect of Tolerance.” 20 He protected the Capuchin monks who entered Russia, but banished the Jesuits (1710) as too sedulous in propaganda for the Roman Church. In general the religious reforms of Peter were the most lasting of all. They ended the Middle Ages in Russia.
A vast process of secularization changed the life and spirit of Russia from domination by priests and landlords to rule, almost regimentation, by the state. Peter subordinated the boyars to his will, made them serve the public, and reorganized social ranks according to the importance of the social service performed. A new aristocracy arose, composed of officials in the army, the navy, and the bureaucracy. The government was headed by a Senate of nine (later twenty) men appointed by the Czar; it was administered by nine “colleges” directing respectively taxation and revenue, expenditure, audit and control, commerce, industry, foreign relations, war, navy, and law. Responsible to the Senate were the governors of the twelve provinces, or guberniyas, and the councils that ruled the cities. The population of each city was divided into three classes: rich merchants and the professions, teachers and craftsmen, wage earners and laborers; only the first class could be elected to the municipal council (magistrat), only the first two classes could vote, but all male taxpayers could take part in the town meetings. The mir, or village community, took form not as a democratic institution, but as a body collectively responsible for the poll tax introduced in 1719. Local autonomy was checked by central control, and there was no thought of democracy. The rapid transformation that Peter planned could be achieved, if at all, only by dictatorial power.
That transformation had to be economic as well as political, for no purely agricultural society could long maintain its independence against states enriched and armed by industry. A German economist of the time pointed out what the next two hundred years would prove—that a nation exporting chiefly raw material and agricultural products would soon become vassal to states producing and exporting chiefly manufactured goods. 21 For agriculture, therefore, Peter did little. Instead of reducing serfdom he extended it to industry. By his own example he taught the peasants how to cut their corn, and he commanded the replacement of sickles with scythes. The Russians were accustomed to burn the woodlands to provide fertilizing ashes for the soil; Peter forbade this, needing lumber for his ships, trees for his masts. He introduced the cultivation of the tobacco plant, the mulberry, and the vine, and began the Russian breeding of horses and sheep.
But his chief aim was rapid industrialization. The first problem was to provide raw materials. He spurred the spread of mining; he gave stimulating rewards to men like Nikita Demidov and Aleksandr Stroganov who showed enterprise and skill in mining and metallurgy; he urged landowners to encourage or allow the extraction of minerals from their soils, and decreed that if they neglected to do this their soil might be mined by others by paying them merely a nominal fee. By 1710 Russia ceased to import iron; before Peter’s death it was exporting it. 22
He brought in foreign artisans and managers, and prodded the Russians of every rank to learn the industrial arts. An Englishman opened in Moscow a factory for treating hides and making shoes; Peter commanded every town in Russia to send a delegation of cobblers to Moscow to learn the latest methods of making boots and shoes, and held the galleys as a threat over shoemakers who clung to their old ways. To encourage the Russian textile industry he wore, after this was functioning, only native-made cloth, and forbade the Muscovites to buy imported stockings. Soon the Russians were making good textiles. An admiral shocked tradition and delighted the Czar by manufacturing silk brocades. A muzhik developed a lacquer superior to any similar product in “Europe” except the Venetian. Before the reign was over there were 233 factories in Russia. Some were quite large: the Moscow manufacture of sailcloth employed 1,162 workers; one textile mill used 742 men; another, 730; one metallurgical establishment had 683 employees. 23 There had been factories in Russia before Peter, but not on this scale. Many of the new plants were started by the government and were later sold to private management; but even then they received state subsidies, and were subject to detailed supervision by the government. High protective tariffs shielded the incipient industries from foreign competition.
To man the factories Peter resorted to conscription. Since there were few free laborers available, peasants were converted, willy-nilly, into industrial workers. Manufacturers were empowered to buy serfs from landlords, and put them to work in the factories. Large-scale undertakings were supplied with peasants transferred from state lands and farms. 24 As in most governmental attempts at rapid industrialization, the leaders could not wait for the acquisitive instinct to overcome habit and tradition and lead workers from old fields and ways to new tasks and disciplines. An industrial serfdom was developed, more or less reluctantly by Peter, deliberately by his successors. Peter apologized in an edict of 1723:
Is not everything done [at first] by compulsion? That there are few people willing to go into business [industry] is true, for our people are like children, who never want to begin the alphabet unless they are compelled by their teachers. It seems very hard to them at first, but when they have learnt it they are thankful. Already much thanksgiving is heard for what has already borne fruit. . . . So in manufacturing affairs we must act and compel, and help by teaching. 25
But industry could not develop without commerce to sell its products. To encourage commerce Peter raised the social status of the merchant class. He forced the growth of a great shipbuilding industry at Archangel and St. Petersburg. He tried (and failed) to establish a merchant marine to carry Russian goods in Russian ships; the muzhik, rooted and locked in his land, did not take willingly or ably to the sea. Within Russia itself trade was discouraged by great distances and forbidding roads. But rivers abounded, fed by the snows of the north and the rains of the south; and when the rivers froze they froze so firmly that they, like the frozen roads, could carry heavy loads. What was needed was to bind these rivers with canals—to lead the Neva and the Dvina to the Volga, and the Volga to the Don, and so unite the Baltic and the White Sea with the Black Sea and the Caspian. Peter laid the foundation of the great system, and opened in 1708 the link between the Neva and the Volga; but several reigns had to pass before the network was complete, and thousands of workers died in the attempt.
War and his multifarious enterprises compelled Peter to raise capital in quantities unprecedented in Russia. Part of this he secured by giving the government a monopoly in the production and sale of salt, tobacco, tar, fats, potash, resin, glue, rhubarb, caviar, even of oak coffins. These coffins were sold at a profit of four hundred per cent; salt made a modest one hundred per cent. But the Czar realized that monopolies discouraged both industry and trade, and after peace was signed with Sweden he abolished them at one stroke, leaving internal trade free. Foreign trade remained subject to import and export duties, but it multiplied almost tenfold between 1700 and Peter’s death in 1725. Most of it was carried in foreign vessels, and what remained in Russian hands was hampered by widespread bribery that even Peter’s draconic penalties could not suppress.
Taxation was exhaustive. A special group of governmental appointees was charged with devising and administering new taxes. There were taxes on hats, boots, beehives, rooms, cellars, chimneys, birt
hs, marriages, beards. A tax on households was frustrated by whole and chaotic migrations; Peter changed it to a tax on “souls” wherever found; this did not apply to the nobility or the clergy. The revenues of the state rose from 1,400,000 rubles in 1680 to 8,500,000 in 1724—of which seventy-five per cent went to the army and navy. Half of the increase was unreal, being due to a fifty per cent depreciation of the currency during Peter’s reign, for he could not resist the temptation to make a temporary profit by debasing the coinage.
From monarch to muzhik dishonesty clogged the economy, the collection of taxes, the decisions of the courts, the administration of the laws. Peter decreed death for all officials who accepted “gifts,” but one of his aides warned him that if he enforced this decree he would soon have none but dead officials. He killed some of them nevertheless. Prince Matvei Gagarin, governor of Siberia, became too conspicuously rich; he adorned his statue of the Virgin with jewels worth 130,000 rubles; Peter wanted to know how the Virgin got them; when he found out he had Gagarin hanged. In 1714 several high officials were arrested for stealing from the government and the people; they included the vice-governor of St. Petersburg, the head of the state commissary, the head of the admiralty, the commandants of Narva and Revel, and several senators. Some were hanged, some were given life imprisonment, some had their noses slit, some were beaten with rods. When Peter gave the order to halt the punishment, the soldiers who had administered it begged him, “Father, allow us to flog a little more, for the thieves [have] stolen even our bread.” 26 Corruption continued. A Russian proverb said that Christ himself would steal if his hands were not tied to the Cross.
Amid this struggle of one will to change the economic and political life of half a continent, Peter found time to attempt a cultural revolution too. He hated superstition, and longed to replace it with education and science. The Russians had heretofore dated the years from the supposed creation of the world, and had begun them with September. Peter, in 1699, brought the Russian calendar in harmony with the Julian, as used by the Protestant states; hereafter the year was to begin with January, and be dated from the birth of Christ. The people complained; how could God have chosen midwinter as the time of Creation? Peter had his way, but he did not dare adopt the Gregorian calendar, which Catholic Europe had accepted in 1582. The elimination of ten days, as required by that “papistical trick,” would have robbed several Orthodox saints of their holydays.
The restless Czar succeeded in the equally difficult enterprise of reforming the alphabet. The Orthodox Church used the old Slavonic alphabet, but the business classes had adopted an alphabet based on the Greek. Peter ordered all secular works to be printed in this new form. He imported printing presses and printers from the Netherlands; he started (1703) the first Russian newspaper, the Gazette of St. Petersburg; he ordered and financed the publication of books on technology and science; he founded the Library of St. Petersburg, and established the Russian Archives by gathering into the library the manuscripts, records, and chronicles of the monasteries. He opened several technical institutes, and ordered the sons of the aristocracy to enter them. He tried to set up in each province a “mathematical school,” and in Moscow he provided a gymnasium after the German model, to teach languages, literature, and philosophy; but these schools did not long survive. In 1724 he organized the Academy of St. Petersburg; to this he brought such distinguished savants as Joseph Delisle to teach astronomy, and Daniel Bernoulli for mathematics. On Leibniz’ prompting he commissioned (1724) Vitus Bering, the Danish navigator, to lead an expedition to Kamchatka to find out whether Asia and America were physically united. Bering sailed after Peter’s death.
Under Alexis the Russian theater had given only private performances. Peter licensed a theater on the Red Square and opened it to the public; he imported German players, who presented fifteen tragedies and comedies, including some of Molière. Foreign musicians were brought in to provide orchestras; the sonata and the concerto were introduced into Russia, and Russian secular music took European forms of harmony and counterpoint. Peter commissioned the purchase of paintings and statues, chiefly Italian, gathered these and other works into a museum of art in St. Petersburg, opened the museum to all visitors without charge, and had refreshments served to them. 27 Foreign painters came to paint portraits in Western style. Some churches were built during the reigns of Alexis, hardly any under Peter; architects now found it more profitable to build palaces.
No great literature flowered during this uprooting revolution; time would be needed before the stimulus of Peter would be felt in poetry. One brave book appeared in the year before Peter’s death. Ivan Possoshkov’s Book of Poverty and Wealth chided the Russians for barbarism and illiteracy, and strongly supported the Czar’s reforms. “Unhappily,” it said, “our great monarch is almost alone, with ten others, in pulling upwards, while millions of individuals pull downwards.” 28 Ivan denounced the oppression of the peasantry, demanded an impartial administration of justice by courts free from class domination, and shocked the Czar by asking that representatives of all classes be brought together to write a new constitution and code of laws for Russia. A few months after Peter’s death Possoshkov was arrested; he died in prison in 1726.
III. AFTERMATH
The resistance to Peter’s reforms rose from year to year. The Russians were accustomed to poverty, suffering, and despotism, but not even under Ivan the Terrible had they borne such burdens, or paid such taxes, or died in such numbers not only in battle but in forced labor, from hunger, cold, exhaustion, and disease. “Misery increases from day to day,” wrote Peter’s beloved Lefort in 1723; “the streets are full of people who try to sell their children . . . The government pays neither the troops, nor the navy, nor the [administrative] colleges, nor anybody.” 29 The Czar, bewildered by the growth of poverty amid his reforms, made it a crime to beg, or to give to beggars, and set up sixty organizations to distribute charity.
Begging continued, and crime spread. Serfs fleeing from servitude, soldiers and conscript laborers deserting their camps at the risk of their lives, almost ruled the roads. Sometimes they organized themselves into regiments, several hundred strong, which besieged and captured cities. “Moscow,” reported a general in 1718, “is a hotbed of brigandage, everything is devastated, the number of lawbreakers is multiplying, and executions never stop.” Some streets in Moscow were barricaded by the citizens, some houses were surrounded with high fences, to keep thieves out. Peter tried to suppress robbery by severity: captured brigands were to be hanged, housebreakers were to have their noses cut off to the bone, etc. The criminals were not deterred. Life was so hard for the poor that they looked upon capital punishment as hardly distinguishable from the life imprisonment of serfdom or forced toil, and they bore the most appalling tortures with the stoicism of deadened nerves.
Peter was so unpopular that many wondered that no one killed him. The nobles hated him for compelling them to serve the state, and for raising up the business classes to prominence and wealth; the peasants hated him for conscripting them into labor that uprooted them from their homes, often from their families; churchmen hated him as the Beast of the Apocalypse, who had made Christ himself the servant of the government; nearly all Russians distrusted him for consorting with foreigners and importing “heathen” ideas; all Russia feared him because of his violence and savage penalties. Russia did not want to be Westernized; it abominated the West; to preserve its own national spirit it had to be “Slavophil.” Desperate revolts broke out in Moscow in 1698, in Astrakhan in 1705, along the Volga in 1707, and sporadically throughout the empire and the reign.
Peter symbolized and intensified the conflict by twice returning to the West. In the fall of 1711 he went to Germany to preside at Torgau over the marriage of his son. There he received Leibniz, who proposed to him the establishment of a Russian Academy, of which the polymorphous philosopher hoped to be president. The Czar was back in St. Petersburg in January, 1712, but in October, amid a campaign against Sweden, he too
k the waters at Carlsbad, and visited Wittenberg. Some Lutheran clergymen took him to the house in which Luther had flung an inkwell at the Devil, and they showed him the ink spot on the wall. They asked him to write some comment on the wall; he wrote: “The ink is quite fresh, so that the story is evidently not true.” 30 Peter returned to his new capital in April, 1713. In February, 1716, he was off to the West again; he visited Germany and Holland, and in May, 1717, reached Paris, hoping to marry his daughter Elizabeth to Louis XV. Meeting the seven-year-old King, Peter lifted him up to embrace him; a few days later, received by Louis before the royal palace, Peter raised him like an infant and carried him up the steps, setting the court atremble. He spent six weeks in Paris as a sightseer, absorbing every aspect of the political, economic, and cultural life of the city. He had his portrait painted by Rigaud and by Nattier. He visited the aged Mme. de Maintenon at St.-Cyr. From Paris he went to Spa, and for five weeks he drank the waters there, for by this time he was suffering from a dozen ailments. At Berlin his wife, Catherine, joined him. She discovered that he had a mistress, but she forgave this as in the best traditions of European royalty. When they reached St. Petersburg (October 20, 1716) Peter faced one of the worst crises of his career.
