Peter the Great (138 page)

Peter's hopes for his new administrative machinery often went unfulfilled. The institutions were alien to Russian practice, the new administrators were insufficiently trained and motivated, and the looming, mercurial presence of the Tsar himself did not contribute to initiative and decisiveness on the part of his subordinates. On the one hand, Peter commanded them to assume responsibility and act boldly; on the other, he punished them if the move they made was the wrong one. Naturally, this made them excessively cautious, "as if a servant, seeing his master drowning, would not save him until he had satisfied himself as to whether it was written down in his contract that he should pull him out of the water."

As Peter grew older, he seemed to grasp this problem. He began to understand the importance of government by laws and institutions rather than by the arbitrary power of individuals, including himself. Instead of being commanded from above, the people were to be taught, guided and persuaded. "It is necessary to explain just what are the interests of the state," he said, "and to make them comprehensible to the people." After 1716, his major decrees usually were prefaced by pedagogical explanations of the need for this legislation, citation of historical parallels, appeals to logic and promises of utility.

On balance, Peter's new governmental system was an improvement. Russia was changing, and the Senate and the colleges administered this new state and society more efficiently than would have been possible under the old boyar council and government prikazi. Both Senate and colleges endured until the end of the dynasty, although the colleges were changed into ministries and the Senate was renamed the Council of the Empire. In 1720, the architect Trezzini set to work on an immensely long red-brick building on the Neva embankment on Vasilevsky Island to house the colleges and the Senate. This building, which now houses Leningard University, is the largest surviving edifice of Peter's St. Petersburg.

Peter's reforms affected individuals as powerfully as institutions. Russian society, like that of medieval Europe, was based on obligations of service. The serf owed service to the landowner, the landowner owed service to the tsar. Far from breaking or even loosening these bonds of service, Peter twisted them tight to extract every last degree of service from every level of society. There were no exceptions and no mitigations. Service was the motive force of Peter's life, and the Tsar thrust his energy and power into making sure that every Russian served as efficiently as possible. Noblemen serving as officers in the new Russian army or navy must know how to fight with modern weapons and tactics; those entering the growing Westernized central administration must have the training and skills necessary to manage their new assignments. The concept of service was broadened to include the duty of becoming educated.

Peter began this program pragmatically with his first impulsive dispatch of young Russians to the West in 1696, on the eve of the Great Embassy. After Poltava, the effort became more serious, more inclusive and more institutionally structured. In 1712, a decree ordered all sons of landowners to report to the Senate. They were divided into age groups; the youngest were sent to Reval to study seamanship, the middle group went to Holland for naval training and the eldest marched directly into the army. In 1714, the dragnet was extended: All young noblemen between ten and thirty not already registered or in service were commanded to report to the Senate for service during the winter.

Peter intended the army to be wholly officered by professionally trained Russian noblemen who had begun their twenty-five years of service at the age of fifteen when they entered the Guards or a line regiment as private soldiers. From that lowest rank, each nobleman was to work his way up on the basis of merit. In February 1714, Peter categorically prohibited the commissioning of any officer, no matter what his title, who had not come up through the ranks. At one point, 300 princes of the noblest families of Russia were serving as private soldiers, receiving the minimum in pay, food and comfort. According to Prince Kurakin, it was not uncommon for Petersburgers to see a Prince Golitsyn or Prince Gagarin with a musket on his shoulder doing sentry duty in front of his barracks.

Instruction for these young men, however, went far beyond how to handle firearms and conduct military drill. As more and more of them passed through these training years, the regiments became not only nurseries for officers but academies for service to the state in a variety of fields. Some young men would learn gunnery, some engineering, some navigation, some languages— one was sent to Astrachan to learn about salt mining. In time, the officers of Peter's Guards became a pool from which Peter could draw for almost any service. The watchdogs whom the Tsar set on his Senate were Guards officers; these same officers made up the majority of the civil tribunal which condemned the Tsarevich Alexis.

Although most of the young noblemen went into the army, this was not the preferred avenue of state service; the civil service was growing rapidly, and its entry doors were always crowded as work in government offices was less dangerous, less arduous and potentially far more lucrative. To narrow the stream of candidates flowing in this direction, Peter decreed that no more than one third of the members of a family could serve in civil government; two thirds must serve in the army or the navy.

The navy, a body wholly alien and repugnant to most Russians, was even more intensely and universally unpopular than the army. When a son had to go into service, the father struggled to enter him anywhere other than in the navy. Nevertheless, in 1715, when the School of Mathematics and Navigation was transferred from Moscow to St. Petersburg, its classrooms were filled. "This summer the Naval Academy was opened," wrote Weber in 1715. "I daresay that there was not one noble family within the boundaries of the vast Russian empire but what was obliged to send thither one or more sons above ten and under eighteen. We saw swarms of these young plants arriving from all parts of Russia at St. Petersburg. So that this academy at present contains the flower of the Russian nobility who for these four years past have been instructed in all the sciences belonging to navigation, besides which they are taught languages, fencing and other bodily exercises."

Russian nobles did not bow easily to Peter's disposition of their sons or themselves. Although Peter's first decree in 1712 was simply an effort to bring the lists of noblemen up to date and register them for future service, the Tsar knew he could not easily uproot these young men from their comfortable lives in the provinces. Accordingly, he accompanied the order with the threat that failure to report would be punished by fines, corporal punishment and confiscation of property. He added that anyone accurately identifying a nobleman who failed to report would receive all of that nobleman's wealth, even if the informer was "a runaway serf."

This threat often failed. Noblemen dreamed up endless deceptions and explanations, business and travels, visits abroad and to monasteries, to avoid registering for service. Some simply disappeared into the vast emptiness of the Russian land. A clerk or soldier would arrive to investigate and find a deserted house; oddly, no one in the village would know where the master had gone. Some escaped service by pretending illness or feigning holy foolishness: "He jumped into the lake and stood there with the water lapping at his beard." When one group of young noblemen enrolled in a Moscow theological seminary to evade service, Peter swiftly drafted all these novice monks into the navy, packed them off to the Naval Academy in St. Petersburg and, as further punishment, sent them to drive piles along the Moika Canal. General-Admiral Apraxin, offended by this humiliation of the honor of old Russian families, went to the Moika, stripped off his admiral's uniform with its blue ribbon of the Order of St. Andrew and hung it on a pole, and began to drive piles beside the young men. Peter came up and asked with astonishment, "How is it, Fedor Matveevich, that you, a general-admiral, are driving piles?" Forthrightly, Apraxin replied, "Sire, these laborers are my nephews and grandchildren. Who am I then and by what right should I be privileged?"

In time, Peter was forced to decree that all noblemen who failed to report for service were outlaws. This meant that they could be robbed or killed with impunity, and that anyone bringing in such an outlaw would receive half of the outlaw's property. Finally, in 1721, also to limit evasion, Peter established the office of Herald, whose duty was to keep up-to-date lists of the nobility, recording the names of all male children and the place and capacity in which these sons were meeting their obligation of state service.

Education, in Peter's mind, was simply the first rung on the ladder of state service, and he tried to place every child on that ladder at a tender age. In 1714, along with his plan for compulsory enrollment of all noblemen into the army at fifteen, he decreed that their younger brothers must enroll in secular schools at the age of ten. For five years, until they were ready for the army, they were to leam to read and write and do elementary arithmetic and geometry; until a young man had a certificate stating that he had finished this course, he was forbidden to marry. Landowners deeply resented this disruption of their traditions, and two years later, in 1716, Peter admitted defeat and revoked his decree. His effort to insist on compulsory education for children of the middle class also met with such widespread resistance and evasion that Peter was forced to give it up.

Once noblemen or others were enrolled in the service of the state, whether in military, naval or civil administration, their promotion supposedly was based on merit. A different and potentially far-reaching reform incorporating the principle of meritocracy was the Tsar's overthrowing of the time-honored Muscovite law of inheritance. Traditionally, when a father died, his landed estate and other immovable property was equally divided among his sons. The result of this continual subdivision into smaller and smaller plots was the impoverishment of the gentry and the drying up of sources of tax revenue. Peter's decree of March 14, 1714, declared that a father must pass his undivided estate to only one son—and that this son need not be the eldest. (If there were no sons, the same rules should be applied to daughters.) In England, Peter had been impressed by the system in which the eldest son inherited both title and land and the younger sons were expected to go into the army, the navy or some form of commerce. But Peter rejected primogeniture and chose inheritance by merit, which he thought would be even more productive than the English system: The ablest son would inherit, the land would be kept whole, thus preserving the wealth and distinction of the family (and facilitating the collection of taxes), the serfs would be better cared for, and the disinherited sons would be free to find some useful occupation in the service of the state. Unfortunately, no decree of Peter the Great was more unpopular; it produced family quarrels and violent feuds, and in 1730, five years after Peter's death, it was repealed.

Throughout his life, merit, loyalty and dedication to service were the only criteria by which Peter chose, judged and promoted men. Nobleman or "pie seller," Russian, Swiss, Scot or German, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant or Jew, the Tsar heaped titles, wealth, affection and responsibility on anyone who was willing and competent to serve. Sheremetev, Dolgoruky, Golitsyn and Kurakin were illustrious names long before their bearers devoted themselves to Peter's service, but they owed their success not to blood but to merit. Menshikov's father, on the other hand, was a clerk, Yaguzhinsky's a Lutheran organist, Shafirov's a converted Jew and Kurbatov's a serf. Osterman and Makarov began as secretaries; Anthony Devier, the first Police Commissioner of St. Petersburg, began as a Portuguese Jewish cabin boy whom Peter found in Holland and brought back to Russia. Nikita Demidov was a hard-working illiterate metalworker in Tula until Peter, admiring his energy and his success, gave him huge land grants to develop mines in the Urals. Abraham (or Ibrahim) Hannibal was a black Abyssinian prince brought as a slave to Constantinople where he was bought and sent as a present to Peter. The Tsar set him free and made him his godson, sent him to Paris to be educated, and eventually promoted him to General of the Artillery.* These men—Peter's eagles and eaglets, in Pushkin's phrase—began with nothing, but when they died, they were princes, counts and barons, and their names were inseparably entwined with Peter's in the history of Russia.

There is no better example of Peter's promotion by merit than the career of Ivan Neplyuev, one of Peter's most famous "fledglings." Neplyuev, the son of a small landowner in the Novgorod region, was summoned into service in 1715, when he was already twenty-two years old and the father of two children. He was sent to school in Novgorod to learn mathematics, then to the navigation school in Narva, then to the Naval Academy in St. Petersburg. In 1716, he was one of thirty midshipmen serving with the Russian fleet in Copenhagen. From there, Neplyuev followed the Tsar to Amsterdam, whence Peter sent him to Venice to train abroad Venetian galleys. After two years fighting the Turks in the Adriatic and Aegean seas, Neplyuev went on to Genoa, Toulon, Marseilles and Cadiz, where he served six months in the Spanish navy. When he returned to St. Petersburg in June 1720, he was ordered to come to the Admiralty for examination by the Tsar. "I do not know how my comrades received this news," wrote Neplyuev in his memoirs, "but I did not sleep the whole night and prepared myself as for the Day of Judgment."

When his turn came, Peter was kindly and, extending his hand to be kissed, said, "You see, brother, that I am tsar, yet there are callous places on my hands, because I wished to give you an example." As Neplyuev knelt, Peter said, "Stand up, brother, and answer the questions. Do not be afraid. If you know, say so. If you do not know, say so, too." Neplyuev survived the examination and was given command of a galley.