To create swiftly the industrial might which Russia needed to maintain and equip such an army, Peter proceeded in similar fashion. The empire already had a metallurgical and ordnance industry, but Peter used the power of the state to expand it tenfold, and added new branches, such as textiles to provide uniforms for his soldiers, and canvas, ropemaking and shipbuilding to create a navy from scratch. Whole new industrial districts sprang up, notably around the new capital city of St Petersburg, and in the ore-rich regions of the Urals. At first the new factories were run by the official Manufacturing College, but later they were usually sold or leased out to merchants or nobles, often provided with a monopoly.
Shortage of labour was always a great problem. Peter initially wanted to encourage the hiring of free wage labour, which he considered would promote the dignity of manufacture. But his underpopulated raw new industrial areas were uninviting, and in the end he permitted factory-owners, even when non-noble, to buy serfs. He also assigned whole villages to nearby factories to carry out the unskilled labour, while he sought foreigners to staff the administration and perform the skilled tasks. Work in the new plants was usually onerous, unpleasant and conducted in atrocious conditions; worst of all, it was protracted and regulated according to the clock, to which Russian peasants were unaccustomed. For indiscipline, factory-owners were authorized to apply all kinds of corporal punishment, confinement in irons or imprisonment. Factory serfs often complained about their conditions, and not infrequently whole villages would suddenly uproot themselves and flee in order to evade the intolerable transformation of their lives.6
Peter’s industrialization achieved its aims, and it laid the basis for an economic development which endured for a century or so before its drawbacks became crippling. But it did so in a way which, through heavy taxation and forced labour, actually depressed the purchasing power of much of the population, as well as debasing their civil existence and increasing their alienation from the authorities.
THE NEW STATE MACHINERY TO defray the huge costs for which the state was now responsible, Peter drastically simplified the taxation system, introducing a poll tax because that was the easiest variety of tax to assess and collect from the mass of the people. In order to ensure that everyone paid their share, he pruned down the various complicated categories into which society had hitherto been divided. Everyone became a member of either a service (sluzhiloe) estate or a tax-paying (tiagloe) one. In the former category were the nobles (boyars and service nobles amalgamated to form one estate, called the shliakhetstvo and later known as the dvorianstvo), the merchants and the clergy: they provided state service directly and hence were not liable for the poll tax. In the latter category were the other townsfolk (meshchane) and the two classes of peasants: ‘black’ ones and serfs. The tax census (podushnaia perepis’ or ‘soul census’ in Russian) took a long time to draw up, but once it was ready it provided the most detailed account of the population Russia had ever had and by its mere existence fixed each estate more firmly to its dwelling place and function. In particular, it became easier for landlords to prove their right to reclaim fugitive serfs.
The onerous and complicated new functions assumed by the state required a tighter and better-lubricated bureaucratic machinery than Russia had ever known before. It cannot be said that Peter succeeded fully in creating what was needed, but even so his innovations laid the foundations for structures that were to persist till 1917. By nature a technocrat, he delighted in things that worked, and his ambition for the Russian polity was that it should fulfil its God-given function to mobilize the resources of people and land to ensure the defence and prosperity of the realm. He viewed the state as a mechanism which, like a watch or a hydraulic pump, should be designed so that it could do its job with maximum efficiency and minimum expenditure.
This meant first of all reformulating the concept of divine right so that it would sanctify an active, interventionist state. He adopted the title of Russorum Imperator, using Latin to evoke the military glory of the First Rome, while the commonly used epithets ‘pious and gentle’ dropped out of currency. Religious processions were replaced by splendid entries through triumphal arches, with Peter cast in the personae of Mars or Hercules, pagan gods who owed their victories to their own strength and valour. After the final victory over Sweden he took the additional title of Otets otechestva, equivalent of the Latin pater patriae. The heritage of the Second Rome, Byzantium was downgraded, and the Russian saint whom Peter chose for special reverence was Aleksandr Nevskii, whose military victories had laid the basis for Russia’s claims to the Baltic coast: his remains were transferred to a monastery in the new capital city.7
His emphasis on worldly greatness and achievement did not mean that Peter was not a believer, but it did decouple the secular power from its partnership with the church. He abolished the Patriarchate and subordinated the church to himself by creating the Holy Synod with his own appointed Over-Procurator as head of it. He appropriated to himself part of the dignity previously accorded to the Patriarch: at the Poltava entry he was greeted with the words formerly reserved for the Patriarch: ‘Blessed be He who cometh in the name of the Lord!’8
In his concept, the state stood above selfish or partial interests, above ethnic or religious distinctions, above even the person of the monarch himself. Peter was the first Russian monarch to attempt to draw a distinction between the state on the one hand and the person and property of the ruler on the other. This distinction was implicit in the new oath recruits had to take when entering the army, to ‘the Sovereign and the State’ (gosudariu i gosudarstvu). He did not always observe the distinction himself, still less did his subordinates, but all the same the first move had been made away from the patrimonial system of rule towards a functional or bureaucratic one, where the public and private spheres are demarcated from one another and each branch of government has a function independent of the personal interests of those discharging the office. Peter even tried to eliminate biology and kinship from the monarchy by challenging the customary order of succession, and stipulating that each ruler should nominate his or her own successor.
Establishing the principles of functionalism and impartiality was the motive for the introduction of ‘colleges’ in 1718 in place of prikazy or ‘offices’. Colleges were functional rather than personal or territorial: each college had its own defined sphere of jurisdiction, be it the army, justice or tax-collecting. Furthermore, each one was headed not by a single individual, but by an administrative board of several persons, to underline the principle that its authority was not to be used to further the interests of any individual or family. As Peter explained in his ukaz of 19 December 1718: ‘The colleges have been instituted because they are an assembly of many persons, in which the presidents do not have so much power as the old magistrates (heads of the prikazy), who did as they liked. In the colleges the president may not undertake anything without the consent of his colleagues.’9
But of course colleges can generate their own inbred loyalties, of the kind evoked by the Russian proverb ‘one hand washes another’: bodies of men as well as individuals are capable of generating their own interests and defending them so stubbornly as to clog the best-designed mechanism. For that reason, the colleges had to accept another of Peter’s principles, that the eye of the sovereign should be everywhere. If the state was a mechanism, then it required an operator, who would have a comprehensive overview of its working, and intervene to correct any malfunctioning. So he placed in each college a personal representative, the fiskal, ‘who should watch that all business is conducted zealously and equitably; and should anyone fail to do so, then the fiskal should report on all this to the College, as the instruction commands him’.10 Since Peter desired vigilance at all costs, he absolved fiskaly in advance of the charge of making false accusations, and in practice often awarded them part of the property