Peter the Great I INTRODUCTION Peter the Great or Peter I (1672-1725), tsar and, later, emperor of Russia (1682-1725), who is linked with the Westernization of Russia and its rise as a great power.

« V LATER REIGN Before long, however, these and other reform measures had to cede center stage to the prosecution of the Great Northern War (1700-1721) against Sweden.

Peter’sjourney west did not result in a great alliance against the Ottomans, but it led to one against Sweden.

Russia fought together with Denmark and the union of Polandand Saxony against Sweden to win the Baltic coastline, the 'window into Europe,' and to break Swedish dominance over the northern part of the continent.

At the time,Sweden was considered to have the best army in Europe and was led by the most famous commander, the youthful King Charles XII.

Thus, the war required utmostexertion from backward Russia.

It has been described both as the reason for Peter’s reforms and as their main burden and limitation. Crushed by the Swedes at Narva in 1700, Peter modernized and transformed the Russian army, and the tide turned in the war.

By 1703 the Russians had scoredimportant victories against Sweden, and Peter founded Saint Petersburg at the site of a former Swedish fortress on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Finland.

Russiadestroyed invading Swedish forces at Poltava on July 8, 1709, and, although the war lasted many more years, the Swedes could not reverse its course.

By 1714Russian troops occupied most of Finland, then a Swedish duchy.

The new Russian Baltic navy, under Peter's direct command, joined the army to defeat the Swedishfleet off Hangö and to carry the war into Sweden itself.

The Treaty of Nystad, concluded on August 30, 1721, gave Russia Livonia, Estonia, Latvia, Ingria, part ofKarelia, and certain islands, although Russia returned the bulk of Finland and paid 2 million Swedish rix-dollars.

Russia obtained the Finnish borderlands locatedstrategically next to Saint Petersburg as well.

At a solemn celebration of the peace settlement, the Senate, which had been recently created to assist the tsar ingoverning the country, prevailed upon Peter to accept the titles of Great, Father of the Fatherland, and Emperor.

His acceptance of the last title marked the officialinauguration of the Russian Empire. During the Great Northern War, Peter also mounted a rash campaign against the Ottoman Empire near the Prut River in 1711.

He was fortunate to make peace andextricate himself and his army at the cost of abandoning Azov, some other southern gains, and his southern fleet to the Ottomans. VI REFORMS UNDER PETER Internal reforms under Peter were generally enacted under the pressure of war, usually in an ad hoc, disjointed manner.

Often the confusion they were designed to fixwas made worse.

Still, Peter's reforming of Russia was by no means limited to hectic measures to bolster the war efforts.

Rather, he wanted to Westernize andmodernize the entire Russian government, society, and culture.

Peter literally moved the capital west, from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, in 1712.

Even if he failed tooverhaul all of Russia, changes pointed more and more away from backward Muscovy and toward borrowing from the West.

Peter the Great was not a theoretician, buthe had the makings of a visionary. Of the reforms, the modernization of the army and the creation of the navy were among the most successful.

In 1711, before leaving on the Ottoman campaign, Petercreated a Senate of 10 (later 11) members to supervise all judicial, financial, and administrative affairs in his absence.

Upon his return it became a permanentinstitution, with a special high official, the ober-procurator , serving as the link between the Senate and the monarch, or, in Peter’s own words, as 'the sovereign's eye.' In 1717 and the years immediately following, Peter replaced Muscovy’s numerous and unwieldy governmental departments with new agencies, called colleges.

Originallynine in number, the colleges were councils that served as the main agencies of the newly structured government, dealing with such matters as foreign affairs, justice,and commerce.

The group leadership of each agency was meant to provide a variety of opinion and to deter corruption.

Town government also underwent majorreform.

In 1699 control of the cities was shifted from appointed governors to locally elected officials.

Intended to stimulate the initiative and activity of the townspeople,the reform failed in practice because of local inertia and ignorance.

An even greater failure was provincial reform, again very progressive and ambitious but totallyunrealistic.

Peter divided the country into 50 gubernias (provinces), for which he established a vast bureaucracy.

A governor headed each gubernia and answered to the Senate.

The system provided more uniformity, but corruption and confusion thrived within the new bureaucracy. Peter was more effective at changing the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church.

His reforms were influenced especially by church-state arrangements in theLutheran states of Northern Europe.

In 1721 a Holy Synod, or religious college, of 10, and later 12, clerics replaced the patriarch at the head of the Orthodox Church.

Asecular official, the ober-procurator, was appointed to supervise the synod for the ruler.

Although the emperor acquired no authority on questions of faith, the reformenabled the government to exercise control over church organization, possessions, and policies. On the whole Peter had to accept Russian society as it was, with serfdom and the economic and social dominance of the gentry; he did not produce any revolutionarychanges in the Russian economy.

However, Peter’s tremendous effort to make that society and economy serve his purposes brought some lasting social results.

To fundthe wars and the building of Saint Petersburg, taxation became extremely oppressive, with new taxes of every conceivable kind proliferating.

After a census wasordered in the early 1720s, a head, or poll, tax replaced the household tax and the tax on cultivated land.

Serfs and eventually even vagrants—individuals who hadpreviously escaped taxation because they did not own land or were not part of a household—were subject to the new tax. Under Peter, members of the service gentry, landowners who held property in return for their service to the state, were divided into classes.

In 1722, Peterpromulgated a system of ranks that classified the gentry according to their level of service.

This system, called the Table of Ranks, listed in hierarchic order the 14 ranksto be attained in the military, civil, and imperial court service.

Promotion now depended on ability and service to the state, not birth, which historically determined howfar one rose in Russian society.

The Table of Ranks served as the foundation of the imperial Russian bureaucracy and lasted, with modification, until 1917. Peter’s war endeavors provided a strong stimulus to the Russian economy, from mining and metallurgy, which supplied armaments and ships for the army and navy, tothe new textile industry.

But perhaps his most significant impact was in the broad field of education and culture, where the Western orientation could never again bereversed.

This orientation began before Peter’s reforms, but it was Peter who made it state policy and thus transformed an optional and slow process into a compulsoryofficial drive.

In a sense, the Academy of Sciences, planned by the emperor and inaugurated shortly after his death, remained his most appropriate monument. Peter died in February 1725 after a brief illness, without using a new law, issued in 1722, giving him the right to appoint a successor.

His only son to grow to maturity,Alexis, had died in 1718 in prison in tragic and unclear circumstances after having been condemned to death for treason against his father, whose views he nevershared.

The reformer's semiliterate second wife ascended the throne as Empress Catherine I, sponsored especially by Peter's most prominent assistant, AleksandrMenshikov, and the guards. VII EVALUATION Peter the Great was virtually unconditionally admired, almost worshiped, in his native country by the educated public during the Age of Enlightenment, which followedafter his death and which he had done so much to introduce.

He then became a subject of argument in the first half of the 19th century among such ideologists as theWesternizers, who applauded Peter’s accomplishments, and the Slavophiles, who claimed he had betrayed his country’s traditions with his reforms. While historical studies provided a more realistic context for understanding Peter the Great and his significance, his figure remained immense in Russian literature andculture.

Even Soviet Marxist writing after the Russian Revolution of 1917 applauded the emperor.

Soviet historians de-emphasized the role of personality in history andstressed the oppressive feudal nature of Peter’s reign, but they glorified his creation of the navy, his military reform and victories, and the emergence of Russia as a. »