In his teenage years, when he was joint Tsar, foreigners were still isolated in a special suburb just outside Moscow, the so-called nemetskaia sloboda, or ‘German suburb’, to prevent them corrupting the morals of honest Russians. Their segregation attested to the suspicion with which Muscovites regarded the outside world, and especially the ‘crafty ways’ of the West. Peter had violated the taboos surrounding the sloboda by not only visiting the disreputable place, but striking up friendships there and engaging in long conversations with the traders, craftsmen and mercenaries. From his youth he went clean-shaven and in Western clothes, to the consternation of most of his contemporaries, and he ate meat during fast days, in contravention of Orthodox practice.
Inspired by an astrolabe which Prince Dolgorukii brought back from France, he began eagerly to study arithmetic, geometry, navigation, ballistics and fortification under the Dutchman Franz Timmerman. He took to wearing a Dutch sailor’s uniform and calling himself a ‘bombardier’. He listened with fascination to his tutor, Nikita Zotov, recounting the military campaigns of his father, Tsar Alexei, and, anxious to try out his own ideas, he formed ‘play regiments’ among the young noblemen of the court. He dressed them in dark green uniform, equipped them with weapons from the court arsenal, and led them out on manoeuvres which were far from being ‘play’ in the normal sense of the word: some of them involved thousands of people and led to injuries and deaths.1
When he was able to occupy the throne on his own, he violated Muscovite taboos on an even grander scale, by visiting the macrocosm from which the little world of the nemetskaia sloboda derived: Europe, and especially the maritime Protestant countries of northern Europe. During 1697–8, he travelled through the Swedish Baltic provinces, Poland, Prussia, Holland, England and Austria, under the assumed name of Petr Mikhailov, non-commissioned officer of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment (on solemn occasions he expected all the same to be received with the honours due to him).
This expedition was a kind of precursor of the ‘industrial espionage’ of our own days, with the Tsar officially (but not actually) incognito as the principal intelligence agent. In Königsberg he took a short course in artillery, in Amsterdam he worked as a carpenter in the shipbuilding yards, in London he visited factories, workshops, the observatory, the arsenal and the Royal Mint, and he attended a meeting of the Royal Society, which inspired him with ideas about how the state should patronize science and technology.2 Most of this was about as far from royal dignity, especially in its Muscovite variant, as could be imagined, but he picked up in a haphazard way what he wanted from the journey, and he returned with the conviction that Russia must become more like the countries he had visited, not just in its military technology, but in social, cultural and intellectual life too.
He had to break off his journey and return prematurely to deal with a rebellion of the strel’tsy. Set up by Ivan IV to provide an infantry force with firearms, they had long been rendered superfluous by the advance of military science. Their way of life was a prime example of the marriage of privilege with obsolete technology which Peter was determined to eliminate, and he proceeded against them with vindictive ferocity, executing several hundred of their leaders, and then disbanding all their regiments. At the same time, he instituted his programme of introducing Western customs by issuing a decree forbidding the wearing of beards in polite society, and taking the shears personally to reluctant courtiers. It is difficult to imagine a grosser insult to inherited notions of male dignity and piety: Orthodox considered that beards were essential for God-fearing men, and it was popularly held that the clean-shaven could not gain admittance to heaven.
MILITARY REFORM AND INDUSTRY The humiliating defeat at Narva occurred the following year, and it sharpened Peter’s sense of urgency about change. The lesson he drew was one which his foreign journey had already disposed him to accept: that his army, though large, was insufficiently trained and inadequately equipped to fight open battles against the finest European armies, of which the Swedish was one. Methods which had served well in the ‘wild field’ against swift but lightly armed horsemen, weapons which had sufficed – though barely – against the Polish and Ottoman forces, revealed their deficiencies when pitted against the full might of Charles XII’s troops.
Peter now had to lead Russia through what many European armies had undergone in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the process which historians, if hesitantly, refer to as the ‘military revolution’.3 The key elements in this revolution were: (i) the deployment of large masses of well-disciplined infantry equipped with firearms; (ii) the use of highly mobile light cavalry able to fight when necessary as infantry (dragoons); (iii) an increase in the size and penetrative power of artillery, (iv) a strengthening of fortifications designed to withstand this artillery.
These innovations enormously increased the cost of warfare, compelling all European states to devise more effective means of mobilizing the human and natural resources at their disposal, with far-reaching and durable consequences for their forms of government.4 In some respects, for all its backwardness, Russia was at a distinct advantage compared with its rivals in carrying through this process. The society was already structured for service to the state, and the privileges and immunities enjoyed by social groups were much weaker than almost anywhere else in Europe, which meant that taxation and recruitment were in principle easier for its rulers to achieve.
Especially under Tsar Alexei, Muscovy had made a start to its military revolution during the seventeenth century, but in a piecemeal manner which failed to deliver maximum benefit. Since its service nobles stuck firmly to the cavalry style of warfare they had learned on the steppes, ‘new-style’ formations had to be commanded and partly manned by foreigners. Like the traditional levies, they disbanded every autumn to other pursuits, so that the government would not have the expense of supporting them till the next campaigning season opened in the spring. By the 1680s the new-style formations outnumbered the traditional forces, and a reform of the army’s whole structure had become overdue, so that it could adopt the latest strategies and technologies consistently.5
One of the main problems was that warfare was still essentially state-supported private enterprise. Even the new-style soldiers were still raised, clothed and equipped by individual pomeshchiki out of the income from their estates. Now originally, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the pomest’e had been a service estate, like the Ottoman timar, distinct from the votchina, or patrimonial estate, in that it was held on condition of state service being duly discharged. By the late seventeenth century, however, the distinction had been almost completely eroded: the pomest’e had become heritable property, with the result that pomeshchiki no longer had a strong material interest in their military service – though they might render it out of family pride.
Peter decided that the burden of recruiting, training and equipping the troops must henceforth fall directly on the state, which could be done by reinstating the service principle of landholding theoretically still in force. Rather than an army of semi-feudal levies, he aimed to create a regular standing army, and one, moreover, which would be permanently on war footing and not disbanded every winter. From 1705 he imposed the rekrutchina: the system whereby new troops were drawn directly from the village, selected by the landlord, or in the case of ‘black’ peasants by the communal assembly, and were sent to an assembly point with minimal supplies and clothing, thereafter to be taken care of by the state. The provision of recruits was to be covered by ‘mutual responsibility’: that is, if one recruit failed to report for duty or deserted, then the other households of his village had to provide a replacement for him.
Although other European countries had effected mass levies before in an emergency, Russia was the first country to institute conscription as a permanent method of raising its armed forces. From the military point of view conscription had considerable advantages. It enabled