How Did Peter the Great Modernize Russia?
On 27 April 1698, less than two months after returning from his first Grand Embassy to the West, Peter I convened a council in Moscow and ordered the beard-shaving decree: the boyar beard was taxed at sixty roubles a year, the court beard at one hundred. Aristocrats who refused the shears were pushed bodily out of the assembly hall. The decree was symbolic — a tax on a traditional marker of Orthodox male identity — but it announced the substance of the next quarter-century. Peter’s reign (he ruled alone from 1696 and was proclaimed Emperor in 1721) was a continuous program of forced Europeanization, much of it carried out by conscription, torture, and direct terror (Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 6th ed., 2000; Cracraft, The Revolution of 1688, 1992).
The military
The new army was built from the conscription lists of 1705 onwards. Between 1700 and 1721, the state called up about 284,000 men — roughly one conscript for every seven or eight male peasants of the relevant age. The recruits served for life; they were organised into regiments on the linear model, with standard muskets, cartridge, and drill. The first Russian naval squadron, twenty-two ships built at Voronezh in 1695–1696, took Azov from the Ottomans. The Baltic fleet, launched in 1703 from the new shipyards on the Neva, won the Battle of Lesnaya and the Battle of Gangut and broke Sweden’s naval dominance by 1714 (Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, 1985).
The administrative state
The eleven kollegii (colleges), each headed by a president and modelled on the Swedish system, replaced the old prikazy in 1717–1718. Above them sat the nine-member Senate, established 22 February 1711, which functioned as a supreme court, supervisory body, and, in Peter’s absence, ruler of Russia. The Table of Ranks of 24 January 1722 turned the entire service nobility into a fourteen-grade ladder, with promotion by merit and the fourteenth grade the point of entry into the hereditary nobility. Peter’s 1718 census, completed in 1721, registered 5.6 million male souls, and on that base the 1724 poll tax of 74 kopecks per peasant replaced the old household assessments (Riasanovsky, 2000).
Church and culture
The patriarchate of Moscow died with Patriarch Adrian in 1700 and was not replaced. On 25 January 1721 Peter instituted the Holy Synod, a college of bishops chaired by lay ober-procurator. The Synod sat in the same building as the civil colleges; the head of the Russian Church became a civil servant. Monasteries were put under a state Monastery Prikaz and the bulk of their lands secularised. The Academy of Sciences, founded 28 January 1724, was stocked with foreign — and initially mostly French and German — academics. The first Russian state school system was the german-gymnasium network and the engineering and naval academies. The press was censored: Peter personally edited the first Russian newspaper, Vedomosti, founded 16 December 1702 (Freeze, Russian Levites, 1977).
Economy and capital
The metallurgical works of the Urals, particularly the state complexes of Nizhny Tagil and Yekaterinburg under the demining dynasty of Nikita Demidov, supplied most of the iron for the new army; Russian iron output tripled between 1700 and 1725. The Baltic shipyards, founded on empty marsh in May 1703, became Saint Petersburg, officially the capital from 1712. An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 workers died in the construction; Peter’s press published the figures, as a warning (Cracraft, 1992).
The cost
Modernisation was carried by the serf. The poll tax of 1724 fell on a peasantry already ground by conscription and by the podat (the lump-sum tax to the state). The autocratic state that Peter built, with its bureaucratic colleges, its service nobility, and its censored Church, would outlast the dynasty: the colleges survived until 1802, the Table of Ranks until 1917, the Synod until 1918. Peter’s reforms did not “Westernize” Russia so much as conscript the West — its technology, its administrative forms, its vocabulary — into the service of a Muscovite autocracy (Riasanovsky, 2000).