Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917. Geoffrey Hosking
had only the thinnest of soil in Russia in which to take root. For that reason the artifical implant gave rise to unwelcome side-effects: superficial knowledge, backsliding, insincerity and hypocrisy.
Peter’s solution, as in administrative matters, was supervision by the state, or at least by officials appointed and trusted by him. They were policemen, for whom Peter had a special regard, as the regulation he composed for them in 1724 testifies: ‘The police has its special calling: which is to intervene to protect justice and rights, to generate good order and morals, to guarantee safety from thieves, robbers, rapists and extortioners, to extirpate disordered and loose living. It binds everyone to labour and an honest profession … It defends widows, orphans and foreigners in accordance with God’s law, educates the young in chaste purity and honest learning; in short, for all of these, the police is the soul of citizenship and of all good order.26
The police as ‘the soul of citizenship’: a conception which seemed less strange, perhaps, in the age of enlightened absolutism than it does now, but one which nevertheless betrays the disjointed nature of Peter’s enterprise. Freedom backed by compulsion; enlightenment bolstered by the convict camp. That was the shadow which hung over not just Peter’s reign, but over Russian civilization throughout most of the next two centuries.
Peter’s own character betrayed this dualism. The most authoritarian of Tsars, he was capable nevertheless of abandoning all the accoutrements of majesty and plunging into an ordinary tavern or workshop, to drink, talk and listen to the gossip and arguments of the common people. An apostle of the latest technology, he also valued popular culture, and would enjoy a folksong and a dance to simple melodies with the meanest of his subjects.
Strangest of all is the element of self-parody and of ritual renunciation in his personality. From time to time, he would solemnly install one of his nobles, Prince Fedor Iurevich Romodanovskii, as Tsar, take an oath of loyalty to him and promise to obey all his orders. One is reminded of Ivan IV renouncing his throne in favour of a Tatar prince. Again, during sviatki, the period between Christmas and New Year, with some of his highest officials, he would enact ‘the most foolish and drunken Synod’. The person chosen as Patriarch would parade with a naked Bacchus on his mitre, ‘his eyes provoking licentiousness’, while all present chanted a mock liturgy: ‘Let Bacchic intoxication be upon you, bring darkness all around you, and let it cause you to tumble and roll, rob you of your reason every day of your life.’27
These and other burlesque entertainments suggest a striking degree of conflict inside Peter’s own personality. His rationalist view of the deity and of his own sovereignty contrasted strongly with the beliefs inculcated in him as a child, and still almost universally held in the society around him. Evidently these contradictions generated within him tensions which he felt able to master only by such paradoxical and at first sight puzzling behaviour.
To change the culture even of an elite is of course more than one ruler can accomplish in his own lifetime. But, however haphazardly, Peter had succeeded in fundamentally redirecting the manners and outlook of what under his shaping had become Russia’s ruling class. At first reluctant converts, they gradually warmed to the new cosmopolitan culture, and even embraced it enthusiastically as a mark of their social status.
In doing so, they distanced themselves from the mass of people, the peasants, townsfolk (except for a very few wealthy merchants) and clergy. In so far as they were not recruited into the army or the construction brigades of St Petersburg, ordinary people were spectators rather than participants in the ‘revolution from above’, and their feelings about it were mixed and often critical. Especially hostile were the Old Believers, already alienated by what they had seen of the secular state under Peter’s more moderate predecessors. Most of his innovations could readily be construed as insults to religion or national tradition or both: the shaving of beards, the instruction to wear ‘German’ or ‘Hungarian’ clothes, the introduction of a new calendar, the encouragement of foreign learning, the admittance of women into social life, the introduction of the ‘soul tax’, the abolition of the Patriarchate, the requirement that priests violate the secrecy of the confessional. His blasphemous orgies seemed to confirm the worst fears. Even his policy of religious toleration, which ostensibly benefited the Old Belief, demonstrated that he was intent on undermining the true faith. The apocalyptically minded decided that he was the Antichrist. Popular woodcuts circulated depicting him with the double-head eagle, the official state insignia, as two horns protruding from his head.28
This was not just popular grumbling and irreverence. As under Ivan IV, many peasants fled from the new burdens. In the summer of 1707, when an armed detachment went under Prince Iu.V. Dolgorukii to look for absconded peasants on the Don, they were waylaid and massacred by some two hundred Cossacks, under their ataman, Kondratii Bulavin. This was the signal for a general campaign against official search parties, in the course of which Bulavin was elected head of all the Don Cossacks and concluded a treaty with the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Claiming the heritage of Sten’ka Razin, he advanced with his troops through the districts of Voronezh, Tambov and Borisoglebsk, gaining support from peasants for his appeal to come to the defence of ‘the house of the Holy Mother of God and the Orthodox Church against the infidel and Greek teachings which the boyars and the Germans wish to impose upon us’.29 At its height the Bulavin insurrection threatened the fortresses of Azov and Taganrog, and thus the whole precarious Russian position on the Black Sea. Peter had to divert dragoons he could ill afford from the Swedish front in order to put down the revolt.
Confirmation of Peter’s diabolic status seemed to be delivered by his treatment of his son and heir Alexei. A physically frail and pious youth, Alexei was about as unlike his father as could be imagined. His mother, Evdokia, had been suspected of complicity in the strel’tsy revolt of 1698 and banned to a nunnery, something which Alexei never forgave. At the height of his personal conflict with Peter, Alexei fled abroad. He was induced to return by false promises, investigated in the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz (special investigatory chamber), and died under torture. In essence, his father murdered him, leaving the empire without an heir. Peter subsequently compounded this crime with his decree of 1722 stipulating that each ruler should appoint his own successor – something he signally failed to do himself before his sudden death in 1725.
It is no wonder that historians, Russian historians in particular, have been so divided in their opinions of Peter I. On the one hand, he did what was urgently needed if Russia was to remain an empire, which necessarily entailed becoming a European great power. At the same time, the institutions he created brought profound discord into Russian society, or perhaps it would be truer to say, enormously intensified discord which already existed. The cameralist state, imported from Germany and Sweden, with its impersonality, its functionalism, meritocratic hierarchy and strict regulation, differed fundamentally from the inherited kinship structures of Muscovy, with their personalism, informality, patriarchal hierarchy and absence of functional differentiation. His reforms took the first step towards creating a privileged ruling class, based on private landed wealth, and with a culture alien to that of the common people and of the clergy. At a time when, in other European countries, the distance between popular and elite culture was beginning to be reduced, in Russia it was immeasurably widened.
Of course, the revolution which he aimed at was far from complete at his death. Old attitudes persisted for many decades to come, and under his weaker successors aristocratic (the word ‘boyar’ now at last seems inappropriate) clans feuded for domination of the ship of state. All the same, there were enough highly-placed people who had internalized Peter’s attitudes to ensure that his reforms outlasted him. Unlike after the reign of Ivan IV, there was no disintegration, no Time of Troubles. But by the same token, there was no reaching across the great social divide. On the contrary the chasm continued to widen during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Peter had set Russia on the road to what the Marquis de Custine a century later prophesied would be ‘the revolt of the bearded against the shaven’.30