Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Peter wanted to ensure that government was conducted by responsible and qualified officials. Nobles were required to acquire training in a skill useful to the state, whether civilian or military; their promotion was to depend on their proven merit and experience. His Table of Ranks for military, civilian, and court service stipulated the requirements for each rung of the hierarchy. Army officers even had to go through a period as private soldiers to gain the right to a commission. Nobles were at first aghast at these impositions, but they soon discovered that they were in a far better position to acquire and benefit from education than any other social estate. Meritocracy modified but did not endanger their domination of the political system and social life.

Among Peter’s most fateful measures was his reform of the Orthodox Church. He abolished the Patriarchate, which, as we have seen, was intended to give the Russian church superior status in the Orthodox ecumene, and replaced it with an administrative board known as the Holy Synod, which consisted mainly of senior bishops, but whose chairman could be and sometimes was a layman, appointed by the Emperor. Feofan Prokopovich, his Jesuit-trained ecclesiastical adviser, argued that the Byzantine ‘symphony’ of Tsar and Patriarch had misled believers into imagining that Russia had two equal rulers. He advanced the Hobbesian view that human beings were by nature avaricious and belligerent; without a single unambiguous sovereign, there would be endless civil war. This implied that the ruler’s will was not limited by God’s law, since it was itself an expression of God’s law. Peter certainly believed that.

In many respects, the church now became a constituent component of the state. Monasteries were required to function as agents of social security, offering help to the poor, the sick, and army veterans. Parish priests were trained to offer consistent and correct liturgical forms; they were increasingly appointed from above on meritocratic principles, rather than elected by parish councils. They were, moreover, instructed to report anything potentially endangering state security which they might hear in the confessional: their political duty was to override their pastoral obligations.

Peter’s church reform was in some respects Protestant in form, inspired by the examples of Sweden, Holland, and England. Yet the Russian church lacked many of the features that underpinned Protestantism in those countries: a literate population, scriptures in the vernacular, and active parish councils. Essentially, Peter continued the work of Aleksei, remoulding the church to make it useful to empire. He thereby deepened the split between the church and the old national myth. To many Old Believers, Peter was the Antichrist, abjuring the good old Russian ways in favour of heretical ‘German’ abominations.

There was an ineluctable paradox at the heart of Peter’s intended transformation of Russia: he wanted to inspire Russians to initiative and achievement, but by command from above. He abolished collective petitions and repeatedly interfered where he felt initiative from below was inadequate or misdirected. His personal agents, fiskaly, kept a constant eye on officials and reported on their transgressions. For all the symbolic innovations, in most respects he consolidated the fundamental structure of Russian society as he had inherited it from Muscovy. He did nothing to fill the gap between the monarchy and local communities; on the contrary, he intensified the hierarchical and personal nature of such links as existed.

His project had the support of most of the elites, not least because it was successful in military terms. As a result, though Russia had relatively weak rulers after Peter, it was not threatened by the breakdown of authority, and continued to enhance its status among European powers. Top nobles and senior army officers were prepared to work together with the monarch to maintain social stability and military preparedness. As in Muscovy, they had a shared interest in doing so, to forestall internal unrest and prevent external invasion. That tacit agreement was formulated in each accession manifesto, which stated that the monarch was elected and approved by the people: in practice, this meant that he/she was accepted by the most influential nobles and army officers, with the Guards usually playing a decisive role. Monarchs who were not acceptable in this sense were swiftly deposed, as happened in 1762 to Peter III (r. 1761–2), who managed to alienate those very circles.