What Were the Peter the Great Reforms?

Peter I (1672-1725) was the second tsar of the Romanov line to take that title in its full Byzantine sense, and the only one to found an empire. He ruled from 1682 to 1725 and he presided over a programme of reform that touched every aspect of Russian life — government, military, church, economy, society, language, calendar, dress. The reforms were carried out in the 22 years between the end of the Azov campaigns (1695-1696) and the proclamation of the Russian Empire at the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, and they produced, in the language of the contemporary French ambassador, a Russia that was “still in the work” but recognisably a great European power (see Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought, 1985).

The European context

Peter’s reforms were the Russian case of a broader European pattern. By the late seventeenth century, the French monarchy of Louis XIV, the Swedish monarchy of Charles XI and Charles XII, the Prussian monarchy of the Great Elector, and the Austrian monarchy of Leopold I had all undertaken comparable programmes of state-building. Peter’s reforms were distinctive in their speed and in their social breadth — they reached the calendar, the alphabet, the dress, the very beards of the Russian nobility — but they were not unique. Peter himself modelled his programme on the Swedish, Dutch, and English examples he had studied during the Grand Embassy of 1697-1698 (Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 1998).

The military and naval reforms

The military reform was the centre of Peter’s programme. The Streltsy, the Muscovite infantry corps of the seventeenth century, were abolished in 1698. The new army was built on a conscription system introduced in 1705 and on the new infantry regiments modelled on the Westphalian pattern. By 1710 the Russian army numbered about 200,000 men, with 110,000 in the infantry, 60,000 in the garrison troops, and 30,000 in the cavalry; by 1725, after the Great Northern War, the standing army was about 300,000 men. The army was the model for the new Russian state, and the Table of Ranks of 1722 was the administrative framework of the new military service class (Hughes, 1998).

The navy was created from nothing. In 1696 the Russian fleet consisted of a few small craft on the Caspian and a handful of ships at Voronezh. By 1725 the Russian navy had 48 ships of the line, 787 galleys and smaller craft, and 28,000 sailors. The Battle of Gangut (Hango) on 27 July 1714, the first Russian victory at sea over a European fleet, was the high point of Peter’s navy in the Great Northern War. The construction of St Petersburg was the visible expression of the naval programme; the city’s Admiralty, shipyards, and naval base were the largest industrial complex in the empire (Massie, Peter the Great, 1980).

The government reform

The government was also re-founded. The old Muscovite system of prikazy (chancelleries) was abolished in 1717-1722 and replaced by a system of kollegii (colleges) modelled on the Swedish example. The Senate of 22 February 1711 was the new central administrative organ, supervising the colleges, the judiciary, and the finances. The Procuracy, introduced in 1722, was the central supervisory institution, with a Procurator-General at its head. The new Russian provincial system, introduced in 1708-1719, divided the empire into 11 (later 14) governorates, each under a governor appointed by the tsar; the further subdivision of the governorates into provinces and uyezdy gave the empire a uniform administrative grid that would last, in its broad outlines, until 1917 (Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State, 1983).

The church reform

The Orthodox Church was the most sensitive case. The patriarchate of Moscow, which had been in the hands of a succession of powerful clerics since 1589, was abolished in 1700 by the death of Patriarch Adrian. Peter did not immediately appoint a successor. In 1721, after the proclamation of the Empire, the Holy Synod was established by the Spiritual Regulation of 25 January 1721. The Synod was a college of bishops under a lay Procurator, and the Procurator was the actual head of the institution. The reform was the most controversial of Peter’s measures; it remained the principal grievance of the Russian Orthodox tradition throughout the imperial period (Freeze, Russian Levites, 1977).

The economic programme was centred on the development of Russian industry. Peter founded 200 new factories, including the major metallurgical works of the Urals (the Yegoshikha, Kolyvan-Voskresensk, and Tula works), the linen and silk manufactures of Moscow, and the Admiralty shipyards. The tariff of 1724, the first comprehensive Russian tariff, was the working basis of the Russian customs system until 1731 and the model for the later tariffs. The social reforms were the most visible: the decree of 5 January 1701 ordering nobles to shave their beards, the 1703 calendar reform (adoption of the Julian year from 1 January), the 1708-1710 introduction of new Russian civil script, and the 1722 Table of Ranks (Hughes, 1998).

The legacy

The reforms produced, in the period from 1700 to 1725, a fundamentally different state. Russia had won access to the Baltic (Treaty of Nystad, 30 August 1721), had built a navy, had a new professional army, had a new capital, had a new state church, had a new administrative system, and had acquired the formal title of Empire. The reforms also imposed a high social cost: the conscription burden fell disproportionately on the peasantry, the new taxes funded a much larger state, and the new administrative demands required an extension of the noble service obligation. The 1722 oath of service to the new imperial throne was the foundation of the new Russian service class.

The historiography of the reforms has been one of the most contested topics in Russian history. The Westernisers of the 19th century — Peter Chaadaev, Alexander Herzen, Boris Chicherin — saw Peter as the founder of modern Russia; the Slavophiles, in particular Aleksey Khomyakov and Konstantin Aksakov, saw him as the destroyer of the old Russian order. The Soviet historiography, working from a Marxist framework, treated Peter as the founder of the Russian empire of the nobility. The post-Soviet historiography has been less interested in the verdict than in the institutional detail of what was actually built (Riasanovsky, 1985).