With the restoration of central government, Peter established a Table of Ranks to replace the old court and military ranks he had allowed to lapse. It established an equivalency of civilian and military ranks, and provided for ennoblement of plebeians whose talents allowed them to advance. As a framework for the Russian state administration it lasted until 1917. In the same years Peter also tried to reorganize Russian provincial administration, redrawing the large provinces into fifty small ones, with subdivisions and a separation of administration and the judiciary all based on a Swedish model. Russia, however, lacked the resources for such a system, and after Peter’s death the number of provinces was reduced to fourteen, with another crucial administrative layer below the provincial governors. All this tinkering did not solve the problem of ruling a vast state with limited resources.
Peter’s victories added a new element to the Russian state in the form of the Baltic provinces of Estland and Livonia. For the first time Russia had territories with a powerful local elite that was not Orthodox. The loss of their privileges and lands to Swedish absolutism had led many of the German nobility of the area to support Peter and when he finally pushed out the Swedes in 1710 he granted the nobility their old privileges, including local courts, diets, and control of the Lutheran church on their estates. Elected town government was restored in the hands of the urban German merchants. In the Ukrainian Hetmanate, Peter took a stronger hand, for he engineered the election of Ivan Skoropadskii to replace the pro-Swedish Mazepa in 1708, and then, on Skoropadskii’s death in 1722, abolished the office of hetman altogether. He left, however, the rest of the Hetmanate’s political and legal structure intact and it survived until the 1780s. Thus Russia had not only new territories and peoples, but distinct legal and local political systems in Livonia and the Ukrainian Hetmanate, both differing from the Russian structure. In both places traditional privileges and a system of local elections kept power and wealth in the hands of the local nobility, while the tsar appointed governors to exercise general supervision.
Peter’s intervention in the border provinces was limited. In the inner Russian provinces he proceeded with more new and reformed institutions. After 1718 he replaced the old Russian tax system and his own innumerable financial improvisations with a single tax, the “soul tax,” to be paid by all non-nobles, which also structured finance and social relations until the 1860s. Some of these measures lasted and some did not, but all of them meant that the Russian state now had its basic institutions, their powers and duties, spelled out in law for the first time. The laws were published and provided with elaborate prefaces giving out the rationale for each measure. The new system of government now looked formally more or less the same as that of the rest of Europe’s monarchies.
Along with the new form of government came a new culture. Peter did not suppress the old religious culture, he merely began to import a new one – the secular culture of contemporary Europe. He sent hundreds of young noblemen abroad, encouraged and sometimes directed the translation and printing of European books – not great classics but the textbooks of history, architecture, mathematics, geography, and other subjects. In the last years of his life he sent his personal librarian abroad to recruit scientists for an academy of sciences to be established in St. Petersburg, instructing the librarian to particularly look for mathematicians and physical scientists. The project was on the point of realization when he died, but his wife and successor formally established the academy in his memory. The result was the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1725. Peter was not only interested in science and art, but he also wanted to Europeanize Russia’s social habits. In the european thought of the time, a cultivated and polished people were necessary for an orderly state. Thus in 1719, Peter decreed that the nobility was to change its forms of socializing. The all-male banquets of the old days were to end, and in their place the nobility were to hold a sort of open house (known as “assemblies”) on particular days, and invite their acquaintances including those of lesser rank. Amusements were to be cultivated – music, dancing, and card-playing – and most important, the assemblies must include women. Like so many of Peter’s cultural decrees, it required what had already come into fairly general practice, As the diplomats immediately realized, the assemblies were also a perfect point of exchange of information about politics and simply the news of the day.
Almost the last thing he did before he died was to order the translation of the German jurist and historian Samuel Puffendorf’s book, On the Duties of Man and the Citizen. A widely read popular account of the nature of the state, it founded government ultimately on natural law and a contract among men in the state of nature. Puffendorf also stressed the ruler’s duty to work for the general good, not just his own, and the citizen’s duty of obedience without any sort of rebellion. He thought natural law was the work of God, but otherwise he strictly separated the state and its laws from divine commands. For Peter this meant that the tsar was still the sovereign, but the character of his rule was based on natural and human law, not merely tradition and the ruler’s personal piety. Western political thought had entered Russia.
Peter the Great, with his personal eccentricities and the scale of his accomplishment was a ruler unique in Russian history. For most of the eighteenth century he was the great ideal of the Russian monarchy and its supporters at home and abroad. As time passed, Peter’s image changed, for already in Catherine’s time conservative noblemen began to complain, echoing their ancestors of Peter’s time, that Peter had imported foreign ways to Russia, undermining its ancient religion and morality. In the nineteenth century a full-blown quarrel broke out about this issue, pitting liberal and radical Westernizers against Slavophile admirers of Russian tradition – that is, Peter’s admirers were pitted against his detractors. This was a dispute fraught with metaphysics and national pride, but the question remains: What did Peter really accomplish?
The most obvious answer has to do with religion. The administrative subordination of the church to the tsar was only one side of the changes Peter wrought, however important. Peter was determined to put the church in its place, but he was not irreligious. He attended the liturgy at least once a week in St. Petersburg and more often during Lent and Easter week. His style of religious observance in other respects deviated from traditional Orthodoxy. After his mother’s death, he never made a pilgrimage to any of the many shrines of miraculous relics and icons. In his new capital there was only one monastery, in contrast to the dozens in Moscow, and it was founded only in 1714. Peter went there on occasion, but the attraction was the sermons of the Ukrainian monks, which Peter sought out and seems to have enjoyed. The monastery was dedicated to Prince Alexander Nevskii, certainly a saint in the Orthodox Church, but one known mainly for his military victories, including that over the Swedes on the Neva. In case the significance of the choice was not clear enough, Peter ordered the celebration of the saint’s feast day moved from the traditional November 30 to August 23, the day of the conclusion of the treaty of Nystad that ended his own war with Sweden. Peter knew his scripture and liturgy, and could trade biblical quotations with his correspondents, but his personal piety was the outgrowth of the cultural changes in Russian Orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, the emphasis on sermons and learning over miracles and monasticism.
The key here is the change in emphasis: Peter did not abolish monasteries or suppress the devotion to miracle-working relics. Similarly Peter was not out to eliminate religion. The consequence of his policies was to end the universal domination of religion in Russian culture, and to reduce it to the place it held in the mental life of early modern Europe after the Renaissance: a foundational belief system in a society whose high culture was already secular. Thus he accomplished in thirty-six years a change in Russian culture that took centuries in Western Europe.