The new secular culture imported into Russia in Peter’s time was undoubtedly European. At the time, no one thought of it that way. Neither Russians nor Europeans used the terms “Westernization” or “Europeanization.” They thought Peter had brought education and culture in place of ignorance, light in the place of darkness. Moreover, the term “European,” can be misleading, as it conceals the choices Peter as well as other Russians made among the great variety of European culture. Peter’s personal tastes were unusual to say the least. He had what some contemporaries called a “mathematical mind,” meaning that he was interested in what was then understood to be mathematics. That meant not just a theoretical science of numbers, but also mechanics, hydraulics, fortification, surveying, astronomy, architecture, and many other sciences and techniques that employed more or less mathematics. There were no European monarchs who shared these tastes and they were unknown among Russian aristocrats at his court. He also had a passion for the Dutch, their language, their ships, their engineering and architecture, and their painting. In general his personal culture took its inspiration from Protestant northern Europe, and from there he borrowed his laws and administration, his navy, the engineering for his new capital, and much more. His architects, however, were more German or Italian, in spite of his Dutch leanings, and his sculptors were Italian. His choices were eclectic as were those of the other Russians, mostly aristocrats, whose cultural interests in Western Europe we can trace. Many of the aristocrats, and apparently all of Peter’s opponents, were more attracted by the culture of Catholic southern Europe and Poland – by the Baroque grandeur of Rome and the aristocratic constitutions of Venice and Poland. Some parts of European culture had not yet arrived in Russia, jurisprudence, medicine, and the scholarly study of the classics. For the time being the result was a strange mixture of Baroque Europe and the early Enlightenment, a combination of disparate and sometimes contradictory elements derived from European thought and culture.
Part of the cultural transformation of Russia was a new conception of the state. The traditional Russian state’s goals were very simple: maintenance of the power of the tsar and his government at home and abroad and the conservation of the state by the just and Christian behavior of the rulers. Peter introduced a secular goal, the good of the state (including its subjects) as well as the means to achieving that goal, that is, the establishment of good and legal order and the education of the elite in European culture. It was the latter in particular that Peter’s spokesmen repeatedly stressed, proclaiming that he had brought light (learning) into darkness (ignorance), and that is also how Peter’s European contemporaries saw his achievement. Equally important was the creation of explicit written and legal foundations of governmental institutions, not a constitution in the modern sense, but a sharp break with the customary, unwritten, foundations of previous Russian government. The structure he created was noticeably similar to European monarchies, and was accepted as such in the West. It shared with many European states one fundamental contradiction, that the monarch was the source of all law. That being the case, how could the legal order be preserved if the ruler chose to ignore it? Eventually this contradiction in the continental European states could only be resolved by the French Revolution and its consequences, but for the time it seemed to work.
The Russian state looked like Europe, but it had its peculiarities. Russia lacked one important institution that was universal in European states, a trained legal profession. Russia was not to get a university with a law faculty until 1755, and a trained legal profession came only in the nineteenth century. Another typically Russian problem with Peter’s state was that its new features were concentrated in St. Petersburg. The tsar’s reform of provincial administration had never been very effective, languished for lack of suitable personnel, and was abolished after his death. Unlike European monarchies, Russia lacked an administrative structure dense enough and well trained enough to execute the sovereign’s will on provincial society. Unimpeachably enlightened measures formulated in the capital did not affect the provinces, and just to collect taxes Peter often had to rely on specially delegated military officers. To some extent the new state floated in the air over a society that was not changing with the pace of the capital or even Moscow. For the peasants, relations with the state had hardly changed.
With all these limitations, however, Peter succeeded and transformed his country forever. He did not do this without the aid of some previous changes, particularly in the culture of the church and the boyar elite in the last decades of the seventeenth century. His reordering of the state, however, had no precedent, and came out of his early improvisations and the decision to adopt Swedish models of administration. Peter did not do all of this alone. A major part of his success was his political skill in managing a reluctant aristocracy that inevitably lost part of its power in the new arrangements. The aristocrats, legends aside, were not boyars in long beards trying to restore Orthodox Russia as it was in 1650. They too were European, but with different goals and interests from the tsar, and Peter managed them by including enough of them in the new government, army, and diplomatic corps to keep them quiet if not fully satisfied. Peter also had popular discontent to contend with, and that did have an element of cultural conservatism. When this discontent turned into rebellion, he suppressed it with savage punishments, to the approval of Europe. No one supported rebels against the crown. With the aristocrats Peter worked entirely differently, pretending to ignore their sympathy for his son and keeping them in the center of government along with his favorites and Western experts until the end of his reign. Thus Peter kept the elite together and allied with him and his policies. His mastery of court politics was as important as his relentless determination and iron will.
Peter’s death in January 1725, plunged Russia into a political crisis, for one of the many paradoxes of his reign is that he did not carry out the provisions of his decree permitting the tsar to nominate his heir. Therefore at his death there were several possible alternatives: his wife Catherine, crowned his empress the previous year; his ten-year-old grandson Peter by the unfortunate Aleksei; and several daughters by Catherine. The latter were too young or married abroad, and the choice came down to Catherine or Peter under a regency. The ruling elite split over the choice, but after considerable pressure from the guards regiments, the Senate opted for Catherine. For the first time the guards made their wishes felt and opted for a woman. Though Catherine had a reputation as a very strong personality (“the heart of a lion,” said the French ambassador), she did not prove an effective ruler, and very soon state business went to Menshikov and a Supreme Privy Council formed to manage the state. Then Catherine died in 1727. Menshikov seemed poised for supreme power with a boy tsar, but the aristocrats proved too powerful, and the Supreme Privy Council exiled him to Siberia, where he died. The Princes Dolgorukii and Golitsyn were masters of the government and they signaled a new course, moving the capital back to Moscow. They cemented their position by marrying the young tsar to a Dolgorukii princess. Then fate intervened. Suddenly in 1730 Peter II died of smallpox. The aristocrats had to find a new monarch, and they did not choose Peter’s remaining daughter Elizabeth but his niece, Anna, the daughter of his erstwhile co-tsar Ivan V. Anna ruled in Baltic Kurland as the widow of the Duke, and was quickly summoned to Moscow. At the same time the aristocrats decided to hold on to power by compiling a series of conditions that Anna would have to sign to ascend the throne, conditions giving power to the sitting members of the Supreme Privy Council, the Dolgorukiis and Golitsyns. Here they made a fatal error, for the conditions gave power not to the aristocracy as a whole, but to a clique of families. As the English ambassador reported, the Russian aristocrats “have no true notions of a limited government.” When Anna came to Moscow, she quickly sized up the situation and with the support of the other aristocratic clans, the rank and file nobility, and the guards, she tore up the conditions and restored autocracy. Russia was back on the road Peter had mapped out, but with another woman on the throne who had no direct heirs, male or female. No one knew that for the next sixty-six years Russia’s rulers would be women, like Anna, put on the throne by male aristocrats and guards officers.