Russia. A History

With an artisan’s eye and pragmatic mind, Peter envisioned the transformation of Russia into a great power, its state and society based on technology and an organization aimed at maximizing production. Its hallmarks would be a European-type army and navy (supported by heavy industry to produce arms), planned urban conglomerations after the model of St Petersburg, and large-scale public works, particularly canals linking the major waterways and productive centres into an integrated economic whole. Peter even commissioned Perry to oversee a canal connecting the Volga and the Don, an over-ambitious project not realized until the 1930s.

To supply the armed forces with skilled native personnel, Peter began founding makeshift educational institutions. He put Farquharson and two English students in charge of the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (housed in the former quarters of a Streltsy regiment); its enrolments grew from 200 pupils in 1703 to over 500 by 1711. Farquharson assisted Leontii Magnitskii in compiling the encyclopaedic Arifmetika

(1703), one of the first Russian books to use Arabic numerals, and fulfilled diverse duties. He copied out other textbooks for his students, wrote, translated, and edited scientific works, and supervised thirty-eight translations by others. He surveyed the Petersburg to Moscow road, charted the Caspian Sea, and went to Voronezh in 1709 to observe the solar eclipse. Transferred with 305 pupils to the St Petersburg Naval Academy in 1715, he rose to brigadier rank in 1737 and left a library of 600 books (half from the Naval Academy) upon his death. An artillery school was set up in Moscow in 1701, its 180 pupils increasing to 300 within three years, but it led a precarious existence until transferred to St Petersburg with 74 pupils in 1719. Private schools and tutoring continued as usual. Allowed back in 1698, the Jesuits had a boarding-school with about thirty boys until the order was expelled again in 1719. A German gymnasium opened under the Lutheran pastor Ernst Glück with state assistance in 1705; with seven teachers and seventy-seven pupils in 1711, it taught Greek and Latin, modern languages (including Swedish), geography, ethics, politics, rhetoric, arithmetic, deportment, and riding. It closed in 1715.

Little did Peter foresee that the apparently easy war against Sweden would burgeon into two decades of incessant campaigning over huge expanses of land and water between shifting coalitions of powers great and small. The Great Northern War (1700–21), so designated in retrospect, consumed the bulk of his life. His role as warrior-tsar was etched into the marrow of the Europeanizing empire and shaped virtually every institution and policy adopted over its tortuous course. The demands of long-term warfare, most notably during the first years, account for the peculiarly frenzied and economically wasteful character of the early Petrine reforms.

If Peter blithely entered the conflict, he was shocked by Charles XII’s swift victory over Christian IV of Denmark and Augustus II’s failure to seize Riga. The Swedes’ decisive defeat of the Russian siege of Narva compelled the tsar to reconstitute and rearm the army almost overnight. Over the next eight years some 138,000 recruits were raised; the term rekrut

began to be used in about 1705, one of some 3,500 foreign terms adopted in Petrine Russia. By the end of the reign twenty-one general and thirty-two partial levies conscripted over 300,000 men for the army and the fleet.

The armed forces became the model for the Europeanized society that Peter doggedly pursued. Utilizing European norms and Muscovite traditions, ‘selfmaintenance’ first of all, he fitfully constructed an integrated force under uniform conditions of service, subject to discipline on hierarchical principles, the officer corps trained in military schools, and the whole managed by a centralized administration guided by written codes. The organization was constantly reshuffled as the ostensibly standing army and expensive fleet showed wanton ways of melting away (or rotting in the case of ships) from continuous mass desertion as well as shortfalls in recruitment and losses to disease and combat.