5. An equestrian portrait of Peter the Great

Peter also endeavoured to create what he called a ‘regular state’, adopting European patterns of government, with Sweden and England as his preferred models. He replaced the old chanceries with ‘colleges’, whose collective administrative boards were meant to ensure that merit rather than patronage determined appointments.

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.

The underlying rationale of this synergy between monarchy and nobility was illuminated in 1730, when Peter II (r. 1727–30), grandson of Peter I, suddenly died. With no male heir in view, a privy council dominated by two very well‑ connected families, the Golitsyns and Dolgorukys, decided to offer the throne to Anna, daughter of Ivan V (see the Chronology), under conditions which would have limited her power and inaugurated an oligarchic regime like that of contemporary Sweden or Britain.

Nobles of lesser rank also managed to present proposals to Anna. These likewise envisaged the monarch consulting noble representatives in some kind of assembly, but imposed no express limitations on her. This was close to the traditional Muscovite conception of monarchy, though articulated in language which reflected contemporary European experience of constitutionalism. Anna accepted the alternative proposals and dramatically tore up the privy council document in public. In this way, she perpetuated the tradition of autocratic rule by agreement with broader elites rather than with an exclusive clique of magnates. She demonstrated her devotion to nobles’ interests by establishing a Cadet Corps exclusively for them: they could be trained there and advance directly to officer status rather than endure a humiliating apprenticeship as private soldiers.

The monarch’s power was still de facto limited, no longer by God’s law, but by a nobility which manipulated patronage and kinship in its own interests, but also cared deeply about the security and prosperity of Russia. They were the principal stakeholders in the empire.

This mutual compact left the nobles free to impose their own arrangements on those subject to them, their serfs, and on the lower orders generally. Historians used to believe that serfdom was scarcely distinguishable from slavery. It is true that pomeshchiki exercised virtually total control over their serfs, including even buying and selling them. Recent research has, however, suggested that Russian peasant society was a good deal more resilient and self‑ reliant than the term ‘slavery’ implies. Serfdom at least gave most peasants entitlement to land – a benefit denied to US plantation slaves.

Living in a harsh climate and on relatively infertile soils, most Russian peasants strove above all to limit risk, and at this they were remarkably successful. Subsistence crises were relatively rare, though when they struck they were extremely serious.

The strip system of land tenure guaranteed each household arable land of different qualities, while pastures and meadows were held in common. The periodic redistribution of strips ensured that each household had enough resources to feed itself and make its contribution to the village’s dues and obligations. Joint responsibility ensured that peasants had to take decisions in common and had an interest in helping each other through difficulties. They also kept a sharp eye on each other’s behaviour, since the failure of any one household imposed burdens on all the others. If a household was failing chronically, its neighbours could be ruthless in trying to expel it from the village. Wastrels, weaklings, and drunkards were not tolerated indefinitely.

This agrarian system was successful at providing Russia with resources (army recruits, taxes, and other obligations), ensuring the survival and even growth of the rural population, and underwriting the well‑ being of the nobility. It was the backbone of the empire.