Peter’s governmental reforms thus betrayed a fateful ambivalence. On the one hand they were imbued with a spirit of thrusting confidence in the capacity of human beings to accomplish far-reaching and beneficial change through rational organization. On the other hand, this confidence was clouded by the perpetual suspicion that, left to themselves, human beings would not actually behave in a rational fashion, but would obstruct the most perfectly designed mechanism through idleness, clumsiness, ignorance, egoism or the pursuit of clannish and partial interests. Peter’s letters and instructions are replete with the anxious desire to impose his will on everyone at all times, even in the most trivial of matters, as if he were dimly conscious that reprobate human nature would frustrate his impeccably conceived schemes. He even forbade spitting and swearing by officials in colleges, and laid down punishments for persistent transgressors: ‘as violators of good order and general peace, and as adversaries and enemies of His Majesty’s will and institutions, they are to be punished on the body and by deprivation of estates and honour’.11
At bottom, this was his tacit recognition that the principles of secular, active government, based on strict subordination, impersonality, division of functions and formal regulations, were quite alien to the principles pertaining in kinship systems such as had hitherto pervaded Russian society from the village community right up to the court: informality, personalization, mutual responsibility, ‘One hand washes the other’.12
The social class which was to be the bearer of his new ideals of state was the nobility (shliakhetstvo), amalgamated for the purpose out of the previous courtly and service estates. Peter wanted the shliakhetstvo to be a social category defined not by birth and inherited hierarchy, but by personal merit and distinction in the service of the state: ‘We will allow no rank to anyone until they have rendered service to us and the fatherland’.13 He put the concept into practice by requiring that young nobles should be trained in a skill useful to the state, should present themselves for examination in it, and should then enter service at the lowest rank. In the case of the army, this meant sons of aristocratic pedigree signing on as privates, though to soften the blow to family pride they were permitted to do so in one of the prestigious new Guards regiments, evolved from Peter’s ‘play* troops. At the height of his reforming zeal, Peter even tried to insist that no nobleman without a certificate of competence in mathematics and geometry could even be allowed to marry – a draconian stipulation he later had to drop.14
The ideal of promotion through personal service was formalized in the Table of Ranks, instituted in 1722. It supplanted the system of mestnichestoo, abolished thirty years earlier but never replaced, under which official posts had been distributed according to the inherited family standing of the aspirant. The new Table was based on the military hierarchy, but applied not only to the army and navy, but also to the civil service and the court. It contained fourteen parallel ranks: by working up from the fourteenth to the eighth, a non-noble could win noble status, not just for himself but for his descendants, who were ‘to be considered equal in dignity and benefits to the best ancient dvorianstvo, even though they be of base lineage and were never previously promoted by the Crown to the noble status or furnished with a coat of arms.’15
There was of course a tacit contradiction here, reflecting Peter’s chronic dualism over whether to coerce his subordinates or awaken their pride in service. In principle, a commoner became a noble only by merit, but, having once made the grade, he transmitted his standing to his heirs, who consequently did not have to jump through the same hoops. While Peter reigned, the sheer force of his personality ensured that nobles did what was required of them, but his successors were less punctilious and allowed the element of compulsion to wane. The long-term effect of Peter’s reform, therefore, was to create a new hereditary privileged social estate.
He accepted the logic of this implication from the outset, and tried to buttress nobles’ material capacity to perform state service hereditarily by introducing the system of ‘entail’, as practised in Britain, under which a landed estate would pass in its entirety to one heir, usually male. The intention was to prevent landed properties becoming subdivided until they were no longer able to provide a sufficient living for a nobleman, and also to compel non-inheritors to earn both their livelihood and noble status by entering the civil or military service.16 In this matter, however, he was unable to overcome the deeply rooted kinship obligation to provide for all one’s heirs. After his death the law on entail was repealed: nobles continued, like peasants, to subdivide their holdings.
THE NEW CAPITAL CITY What Peter intended for his servitors was not just a revamped framework for service, but a whole new way of life and culture, of the kind he had observed during his travels. He laid out an exemplar of it in his new city of St Petersburg, constructed on marshy terrain freshly conquered from the Swedes at the easternmost extremity of the Baltic Sea. The city began life as a fortress and a base for the newly created Baltic Fleet, and it remained a demonstration that Russia was now a great naval power, more than a match for Sweden. But from the outset Peter cherished even more exalted ambitions for it St Petersburg was to be a prototype of the ‘regular’ Russia with which he wished to replace chaotic, rambling and nepotistic Muscovy. He referred to it as his paradis-using a Latinate word rather than the Russian rai.
This was no ‘Third Rome’, but a ‘New Amsterdam’. Foreign architects were invited to submit plans for public buildings and standard designs to be used for the homes of his courtiers. Gradually it became a real capital city, constructed in stone and laid out on a generous scale, affording spacious views of sky and water. Or, as an inhabitant of more than two centuries later, Joseph Brodsky, put it, ‘Untouched till then by European styles, Russia opened the sluices, and baroque and classicism gushed into and inundated the streets and embankments of St Petersburg. Organ-like forests of columns sprang high and lined up on the palatial facades ad infinitum in their miles-long Euclidean triumph.’17
All this could not be accomplished without terrible cost. For years St Petersburg was nothing but a vast building site in a swamp. Conscript labourers were brought in from all over the country to flounder in the mud with their shovels and wheelbarrows and often to lose their lives in it as well, through negligence, overwork or as a result of one of the floods which regularly swept through the location until the River Neva could be contained in embankments of stone. A century later, the historian Nikolai Karamzin, an admirer of Peter and his works, nevertheless conceded that the city was ‘built on tears and corpses’.18
By 1713, however, St Petersburg had taken shape sufficiently for Peter to move the court and the principal government buildings to it, and he began to insist that within a certain time nobles who wished to present themselves at court must build themselves a residence there, employing one of the standard architectural designs he had commissioned. To economize on scarce stone, he stipulated that aristocratic town houses should be erected contiguous to one another, in terraces along the embankments of the rivers and canals. New residents, as they moved in, were presented with small sailing boats for their use, and were commanded on pain of fines to parade in them on the water every Sunday afternoon to perform exercises and demonstrate their navigational skill.19
One major symbolic change compared with Moscow: foreigners were no longer confined to the outskirts, but were allowed, indeed encouraged, to live within the city. Merchants dealing in foreign trade were required to re-route their business away from (usually) Arkhangel’sk and the White Sea to St Petersburg and the Baltic. The new capital was to become a ‘window on Europe’ in the commercial sense too.
St Petersburg, by its location and its appearance, was living proof that a new Russia, a European great power, had