In the 1717 tract and elsewhere Peter and his spokesmen also deviated from another norm of earlier Russian justifications for war, the defence of Orthodoxy. In all the wars with Poland and Sweden, but especially in 1653-4, the tsars had made much of this issue, and in 1700 Peter had a good case. The Swedish government did harass and persecute Orthodox peasants, Finnish and Russian alike, after 1619. Stefan Iavorskii, the curator of the patriarchal throne after 1701, did mention this issue in some of his early sermons, but it soon disappeared from Russian official and unofficial pronouncements as well as from the themes of celebrations and other types of propaganda. In a different way, however, Peter retained a religious understanding of his war along with the secular rationale, for he clearly believed that God was on his side. He celebrated his triumphs with liturgy as well as fireworks. In 1724 he decided to correct the liturgy composed by Feofilakt Lopatinskii to celebrate Poltava. He objected to the monk's phrase that Russia had fought for the cross of Christ. The Swedes, he wrote, honour the cross just as we do, 'Sweden was proud, and the war was not about faith, but about measure.'3 Charles XII, in other words,
3 P. Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre Velikom, 2 vols. ( St Petersburg, 1862), vol.
II, p. 201.
was proud beyond measure, and God punished him. Peter wanted Feofilakt to quote the Bible, 'Goliath's proud words to David, and David's trusting in the Lord': 'This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand, and I will smite thee . . .' (1 Samuel 17: 46).
Many motives made up Peter's decision to start and continue the war with Sweden. He felt that his cause was just, even according to the latest European thinking. He believed that Russia needed a port to maintain its prosperity and power. He thought Sweden was preventing Russia from acquiring the fruits of European civilisation. He also understood the prestige conferred by military victory at home and abroad, and the power that it gave in diplomacy. He wrote to his son Alexis in 1716 that it was through war that 'we had come from darkness out into the light; us, whom no one in the world knew, they now respect. . .'[99]
Thus Peter's dogged determination to bring the war to a victorious close should not be surprising. The success of Charles in deposing Augustus II in 1706 and placing Stanislaw Leszczynski on the Polish throne as a Swedish puppet certainly prompted Peter's proposals for a compromise peace, but when Charles rejected them, Peter continued to fight. At Zolkiew in December, 1706, he chose the basic strategy of withdrawal to the Russian frontier that he pursued for the next two and a half years. Charles was in no hurry, sure as he was that his approach to the Russian border would result in an aristocratic as well as popular revolt against the tsar. Charles's advisers had been telling him for years that Russia was unstable and Peter unloved, and he printed proclamations to circulate in Russia calling for revolt. Indeed many in Europe held the same opinion. As the Swedish king moved east, however, his supplies ran low, and at Lesnaia (28 September/9 October 1708) Peter cut off the relief column. At the Russian frontier there was no revolt, so Charles turned south towards the Ukraine where Hetman Mazepa joined him, but without most of the Ukrainian Cossackhost, whose rank and file remained loyal to the tsar. The Swedes managed to survive the winter and laid siege to Poltava, where Peter defeated them (27 June/8 July 1709), his greatest triumph. At Poltava Peter's relentless training, good use of artillery and understanding of his limits gave him victory. Peter built field fortifications and let Charles attack him, realising that his army lacked the precise training and experience for an attack. The steadfast courage of his infantry broke the Swedish assault, not the last battle of this type in Russian history. Even more crushing to Charles's fortunes was the aftermath, for he escaped across the Dnieper to Turkish territory, leaving behind all the troops who had escaped from Poltava. His veterans, dispersed as prisoners through Siberia, could not be replaced in a small country like Sweden.
The rest ofthe Northern War was a struggle to finish the job. Charles was as stubborn as Peter, and even the loss ofall the Swedish German possessions and the Russian conquest of Finland in 1713-14 did not shake his resolve. Instead, Charles spun fantastic plans to conquer Norway, where he perished in 1718. For Russia, the years after Poltava meant coalition warfare in northern Germany and new diplomatic complexities. Denmark was a largely loyal ally until 1720, but too small to be of much use. Hanover and other German states were glad to seize Swedish possessions, but Peter's marriage of his daughter to the Duke of Mecklenburg in 1716 convinced both the Habsburgs in Vienna and King George I of Great Britain and Hanover that Peter had great designs in the Baltic. In fact, the Mecklenburg scheme was part of a desperate attempt to surround Sweden and put enough pressure on Charles to accept defeat and make peace. His death brought a new king and queen to the Swedish throne, who hoped to rely on the British navy to pressure Peter into a peace favourable to Sweden. Their hope was in vain. The British navy was certainly enormously more powerful than Peter's ships of the line with their newly trained crews and foreign officers, but the Russian galley fleet, borrowed from Mediterranean practice to sail in the Baltic skerries, inflicted devastating raids on the Swedish coast with virtual impunity. At Nystad in August, 1721, Peter got all he wanted: Ingria, Karelia, Viborg, Estonia and Livonia. Russia had a port, with a large defensive perimeter around it, and was now a European power, dominant in the north-east.
The final war of Peter's life was in a totally different direction, and seems to have been entirely commercial in inspiration. This was the Persian campaigns. Peter had toyed with the idea of exploiting the internal dissension in Iran for some time, but only with the conclusion of the Northern War was he free to move south. This he did immediately, a difficult series of campaigns overland and by sea, ending in the short-lived Russian occupation of Gilan. Peter's correspondence with Artemii Volynskii and other documents make clear that this was a commercial enterprise. The idea was to seize the silk-producing areas of northern Iran, which had long provided Russia with silk, both for its own needs and for resale to Europe.[100] Peter had learned from the Dutch and
English that overseas trade backed by military force was the road to wealth and power, and in a small way was determined to imitate them. Ultimately Russia had neither the commercial development nor the type of military forces necessary for such a task, and in 1735 had to return the territories to Iran.
99
N. G. Ustrialov,
100
S. M. Solov'ev,
366-77.