PETER THE GREAT

JACOB W. KIPP

Few princes' claims to the title "enlightened ruler" have been so vigorously defended and violently attacked as those of Peter the Great (1672-1725). For his partisans, both foreign and domestic, he was the "Tsar Transformer," the driving spirit behind the Westernization of his country and its emergence as a great power. His critics, while they have accepted his reforms as a turning point in Russian history, have rejected both his means and ends. For them his reforms were too rapid, too universal, and too little in keeping with the customs and mores of Moscovite society.1 Both defenders and detractors have, however, recognized military affairs as standing at the center of Peter the Great's activities and have seen his reforms in other areas as the product of military requirements.2 Yet, in military historiography, Peter's reputation has been quite distinct. Here the Great Westernizer has been seen as the founder of a "Russian national school" of military theory, based upon the practical experiences of Russian forces in the field during the Northern War. This school, which links together the name of Peter with those of Rumiantsev and Suvorov, has been contrasted to that of the Prussianizers, Field Marshal Munnich, Peter III, and Paul I.3 The integration of these two distinct historiographic traditions--civil and military--will be the topic of this essay.

Since both the civil and the military historiography recognize that military affairs played so central a role in Peter I's career, it is appropriate to begin with an assessment of his contribution in that area. For those who have seen Peter as the architect of his age, the Tsar was, to use the words of Feofan Prokovich, church reformer and Petrine ideologue, Russia's "samson" and first "Japhet." Of Peter's contribution to the army Prokopovich wrote: "Finding an army that was disorderly at home, weak in the field, but butt of the enemy's derision, he created one that was useful to the fatherland, terrible to the enemy, renowned and glorious elsewhere." On Peter's contribution to the Navy he made even more sweeping claims: "He accomplished a deed heretofore unheard of in Russia: the building and sailing of ships, of a new fleet that yields to none among the old ones. It was a deed beyond the whole world's expectation and admiration, and it opened up to thee, Russia, the way to all corners of the earth and carried thine power and glory to the remotest oceans, to the very limits set by thy own interests and by justice."4

To assess such claims we must first examine the Moscovite military establishment on the eve of Peter I's transformations. Institutionally, Russia had two armies that had grown up side-by-side in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Richard Hellie has pointed out, the older force, which rested upon the existing social order, was composed of three elements: the gentry cavalry levy, the streltsky/ musketeers, which had first been organized during the reign of Ivan IV, and the various cossack hosts.5 Since the mid-sixteenth century Russia had been importing military technology from abroad, and in the seventeenth century when the limitations of the old army were clear Russian rulers had begun to raise new formations. As early as the reign of Boris Godunov (1598-1605) "foreign regiments" had made their appearance. Officered by foreign adventurers, these semi-standing formations of infantry [soldaty] and cavalry [reitary] had played a major role in Tsar Alexei's military successes during the Thirteen Year War with Poland-Lithuania (1654-1667).6 Such foreign officers became the young Peter's closest companions during his visits to the German Quarter and had a prominent role in his war games with his "play regiments." In 1696 nearly a thousand such officers were listed in Moscovite service, including 723 infantry officers and 231 cavalry officers.7

Thus, the Russian military was in transition in the late seventeenth century, and Western European military formations and doctrine were already familiar. But this process was hardly systematic or decisive. In no areas were the contradictions of the existing military order more apparent than in the chaotic structure of the central military chanceries [prikazy]. These institutions were formed, what one scholar has called, a "motley structure;" each innovation had lead to the creation of- a new chancery and further fragmentation of authority and direction. Peter himself down to the outbreak of the Northern War, continued along this path. Since no formations, including the foreign regiments, were permanently maintained by the state, the supply services scarcely existed.8 In 1701, just after Peter I had begun the process of military reform, and following the disaster at Narva, I. T. Pososhkov left the following description of the Moscovite army to underscore the need for reform:

The infantry had poor firearms and did not know how to use them; they would merely defend themselves with pikes and halberds--dull ones at that. For one enemy's life they would exchange three or four or even more of ours. . . . And not only foreigners, but we ourselves would feel shame even to look at the cavalry: they would show up on poor nags, with blunt sabers, ill equipped, ill clad, not knowing how to use firearms. . . . I have even seen some gentry who did not know how to load a pistol, let alone shoot at a target.9

While Pososhkov's criticisms may be overdrawn and apply more to the strelsky and gentry cavalry than to the foreign regiments, the point remains that the record of Moscovite arms in the second half of the seventeenth century was at best a mixed one: success against the Poles during the Thirteen Years War but repeated failures against the Ottomans and their Crimean Tartar allies--Golitsyn's Crimean campaigns of 1687 and 1689 and the first Azov Campaign of 1695. The common impression was one of weakness and vulnerability. The streltsy had become more of a threat to public order than the Tsar's enemies, and foreign formations were used increasingly to maintain internal order, or so it seemed to many Russians.10 The period following the overthrow of Grand Duchess Sophia and her lover, Prince Golitsyn, to the suppression of the streltsy following their revolt in 1698 witnessed a coexistence of both armies and a rival of the gentry cavalry levy.11

E. Shmurlo has cogently outlined what were the critical weaknesses of the Moscovite military system in its pre-reform stage: inadequate military organization, insufficient combat training, poor discipline, unstandardized weapons, slow mobilization, very limited offensive capabilities and an underdeveloped supply and logistical system.12 Peter did, however, have a foundation to build on.

The same situation was not, according to conventional wisdom, the case with maritime affairs. Here, Peter's innovations were uniquely his own. Indeed, M. S. Anderson, in a recent biography, has continued a very British bias of seeing Peter I's nautical enthusiasm as a "passion, largely irrational and in a sense childish."12 Anderson, in this view, joins a long line of British statesmen and ambassadors who regularly concluded that the existence of a Russian Navy was nothing more than an imperial whim, lacking in either popular support or logic.13 Russian historians and naval officers have, of course, not agreed with such an assessment of the acknowledged founder of the Russian Navy. E. Tarle went so far as to assert that Peter's entire foreign policy could not be understood without an appreciation of its naval-maritime component.14 Russian naval historians have traditionally seen a fundamental linkage between Peter I's objectives in gaining access to the sea policies of earlier rulers in the White, Baltic, Black and Caspian Seas, and in Siberia. Thus, Ivan IV's Livonian War aimed at access to the Baltic, but Russian means were unequal to the task. During the same reign Russian contacts began with English traders at Archangel, and this maritime trade, initially with England then increasingly with Holland, was much valued as a source of wealth by the Mosvovite tsars.15

During the reign of Tsar Alexei the Chief of the Ambassadors Chancery [Posol'skii prikaz] Atanakii Ordyn-Nashchokin actively promoted a policy of seeking to recover access to the Baltic'. Although unable to achieve that goal, Ordyn-Nashchokin did initiate the construction of sailing ships at Dedinov by the Dutch shipwright Butler in order to create a Russian flotilla for the Caspian Sea. The first such ship, the 22-gun Orel, was laid down in November, 1667, and launched in 1668, but burned in 1670 at Astrakhan during the Revolt of Stenka Razin. Ordyn-Nashchokin used Dutch naval regulations as a model to compose Russia's first such naval legislation to govern the operation of the Caspian flotilla. This extraordinary statesman died in 1672, the same year that Peter the Great was born, before he could rebuild the Caspian Flotilla.16 So while historians are correct in seeing Peter I's contribution to Russian naval affairs is unique, they should be placed in their seventeenth century context. Russia certainly was not a naval power, but her most thoughtful statesmen were aware of the oceanic revolution, understood the wealth to be gained from maritime trade, and recognized the awesome power of the broadside ship with its guns. In this, of course, they were not alone. Many other non-Westerns understood that power, as Carlo Cipolla has demonstrated. But Russia's statesmen had begun the process of making that power their own.17 Thus, in both military and naval affairs, Peter I built upon an existing foundation and pressed to conclusion trends that had been present but not acted upon, or acted upon without result.

To both naval and military affairs, Peter I brought his own special talents, starting with a quick mind and a passion for learning in a practical sense. It was the interaction between his perception of existing institutions, his own formal study, and practical experience that defined his particular approach to reform in both military and civil affairs. His own education even by the standards of the Moscovite court had been neglected. He did not learn Greek, Latin or Polish, then considered the languages of enlightenment as Russia drew upon Baroque Poland for so much of culture. Rather, Peter hardly masters written Russian, knew Dutch and gained a technical vocabulary in English, German, and Swedish. By his own admission the subjects that most interested him were geometry, ballistics, and fortifications taught by the Dutchman Franz Timmermann. It was Timmermann who revealed to the young Peter the secret of the English boat, his botik, at Izmailov: its ability to sail close to the wind. That discovery ignited in Peter a passion for nautical affairs that remained with him for the rest of his life.18

Peter's progress in naval affairs reveals much about the Tsar's character, the qualities that made V. 0. Kliuchevskii refer to him as "an artisan-tsar."19 According to Peter himself, his fascination with the botik led him to study sailing under the direction of the Dutch shipwright Karsten Brant, one of those specialists that Ordyn-Nashchokin had brought to Russia to work on the Caspian Flotilla. From Izmailov Peter moved his sailing to a lake near Pereslavl' and there had constructed a "play fleet." By 1692, Pereslavl' was already too small and unable to find a larger lake of satisfactory depth Peter set off in 1693 to test his abilities at Archangel in the open sea. He returned again to Archangel in 1694 to examine the vessels that he had ordered built there the previous year and never again went back to his "play fleet" at Pereslavl'. Peter took an active part in shipbuilding at both Archangel and before the Second Azov Campaign at Voronezh. During the Great Embassy he not only worked as a shipwright in Holland, but went to England with the specific goal of learning how to build a ship according to plans.20 His fascination with naval technology should be compared with that of soldiers and statesmen in modern developing countries who recognize technology and technological borrowing as a key to national development and political independence.

From childhood Peter I filled his days with things military--at first toy soldiers, then real weapons and finally his own "play regiments" and "play fleet." His military exercises with the Preobrazhenskii, Semenovskii, Lefortskii, and Gordonskii regiments gradually crossed the line from playing at war to war games--training for what became Russia's first regular, standing regiments and the core of the Imperial Guard.21 While it was conventional for a royal heir to immerse himself in martial affairs, Peter's education was less structured and more open to diverse influences. His passion for the military was complete and his willingness to learn knew no bounds. These qualities stood him in good stead throughout his career.

Peter combined with this two other qualities that contributed to his successes and minimized his failures. First, he possessed Herculean energy in keeping with his gigantic size. Peter was not only constantly active, but he expected those around him to have the same drive and energy. The dark size of that vitality was a ruthlessness and brutality as witnessed in his suppression of the streltsy and his treatment of the tragic tsarevich Alexei. Often Peter was disappointed by the corruption of his associates and more than once applied his cudgel to their skulls. Prince Menshikov, who owed his rise from obscurity entirely to Peter, enriched himself by diverting funds for the building of St. Petersburg to his personal use, but the same Menshikov acted decisively time and again--on no occasion more effectively than in 1709 when his forces raided the Zaparozhian cossacks' stronghold on the lower Dnieper and thereby denied to Charles XII their support.22 A most appealing side of Peter's character was the combination of this hyperactivity with a common-sense practicality and a shrewd awareness of the limits of his own talents. On land and sea Peter deferred to those whom he saw as having greater tactical acumen. So it was in the second Azov Campaign where he served as a sergeant and bombardier.23

Peter also had a remarkable gift for learning from his own mistakes. Such was the case after the First Azov Campaign and also after the terrible defeat of his new army before Narva in 1700. After the unsuccessful siege of Azov in 1695 Peter called a council of war to determine those factors that had contributed to the defeat. The council recommended major changes in three areas: the expansion of the support services, particularly engineers, to increase the army's siege capabilities; the creation of a unified command, and the construction of naval forces to deny the fort resupply from the sea and to improve Russian river-born logistics.24 The key to Azov in 1696 had been discovered in the councils of war of 1695. It is true that Peter's opponents all too often gave him time to learn, but he knew how to make the use of that time.

What then was Peter's contribution to Russian military thought and tradition and how does that contribution relate to the claims for Peter as an "enlightened ruler?" Peter did possess those rare gifts that marked the great captains of his age: a mastery of tactics, operational art, and grand strategy and a grasp of their interrelationship. Tsarist and Soviet military historians attribute to Peter a series of innovations in tactics. He is credited with developing a particular variation on linear tactics based upon the use of cavalry and artillery in support. Peter stressed the use of secondary lines as reserves, reliance upon field fortifications, and a willingness to employ attack columns armed with the newly-introduced bayonet to support musket fire in breaking an enemy position. He certainly improved the Russian army's ability to pursue a beaten opponent and thereby increased the chances for decisive victories. Peter also utilized flying columns of dragoons and irregulars to disrupt the enemy rear and cut his supplies. Yet, these innovations were more the result of circumstance than system, and Peter seems to have had a rare gift for making necessity into a virtue.25

Operationally, Peter repeatedly demonstrated a gift for economy of force, concentration, and definite objective. Following the defeat at Narva in 1700, Russian forces adopted a strategy of "little war," and through a series of campaigns drove the Swedes from Lake Ladoga and Lake Chudskoe, setting the stage for Russian control of the Neva and through it of Ingria and the Baltic Provinces. This "little war"' which allowed Peter I to establish his window on the West and begin the construction of a Russian naval force in the Gulf of Finland, served as a training period for the resurrected army.26 Peter refused to go beyond practical limits in the assistance that he rendered to his Saxon ally and was unwilling to risk his reformed army before it was ready to meet the forces of Charles XII in the field. In the decisive campaigns of 1708-1709 during Charles XII's invasion of Russia Peter adhered initially to a defensive posture, denying the Swedish King a general engagement but using his forces to disrupt Swedish logistics as the opportunity arose. At Lesnaia in the fall of 1708 Peter defeated Count Lewenhaupt's corps and seized his supply train, thereby denying Charles XII the necessary provisions to maintain his army in the Ukraine. Lesnaia, which Peter referred to as the "mother of the Poltava victory," shifted the strategic balance and permitted Peter to seek a decisive victory in 1709.27 Only during the Prut Campaign did Peter's sense of operational measure seem to desert him. Then he found himself and his army over-extended, without either logistical support or effective reconnaissance, facing a numerically superior enemy deep in hostile territory. Even there, however, his opponent's indecisiveness and his own appreciation of his operational dilemma allowed him to accept admittedly humiliating terms in order to avoid a far greater disaster.28

In the final phase of the Northern War Peter proved to be a master of combined army and navy operations. The Russian advance into Finland and the landing of Russian forces in Sweden proper forced the Swedes to seek terms in spite of the presence of a British fleet. Naval historians in the West have tended to dismiss Russia's first major naval victory at Gangut in July, 1714, as less significant because it was fought by a galley fleet. Yet, that particular fleet embodied Peter's own shrewd observations about the nature of the theater of operations, the Gulf of Finland with its skerries.29 In 1719, F. M. Apraksin with a fleet of 132 gallies and 100 transports landed 26,000 troops that ravaged the Swedish countryside up to the very outskirts of Stockholm.30 A year later on the anniversary of Peter's victory at Gangut units of the galley fleet under the command of Prince M. M. Bolitsyn won a decisive victory over a Swedish squadron of sailing ships at Grenhamn and thereby gained command of the waters around the Aland Islands. To the Swedes this victory meant that Sweden was again exposed to another combined army and navy assault. This fact and the British withdrawal from the Northern War brought the Swedes to the conference table and secured for Russia the favorable terms embodied in the Treaty of Nystadt.31 Indeed, Peter's appreciation of the importance of naval power to the state was embodied in the Naval Regulations of 1720: "Any potentate who has only an army has one arm but he who has an army and navy has both."32

It is in the area of grand strategy that the military historian and the general historian meet on common ground. For it is here that Peter's institutional transformation and foreign policy attract both's attention. Even prior to the outbreak of the mutiny of the streltsy Peter recognized on the basis of the two Azov campaigns the need for reforms that would rationalize Russia's military system. Such reforms implied greater costs for the military and simultaneously Peter sought new means to mobilize the Empire's sinews of war. The Russian army and navy became regular, standing forces. Military education of a Russian officer corps began. Structurally, the army assumed its modern form with the regiment as its basic administrative and operational unit. The concept of unified command established, and the field staff appeared to aid the commander-in-chief and the council of war. The size and cost of Russia's military increased enormously in the course of the Northern War. The state now assumed the costs of arming, training, housing, feeding, and supporting its regular forces. After 1705 its manpower was obtained through conscription, or recruit levy, which fell heavily upon the Russian peasantry. Down to 1714, over 331,000 men were called to the colors for what amounted to lifelong service. Desertion under such circumstances became a chronic problem. Training and discipline by all accounts improved.

Financially and commercially Peter's government followed a mercantilist policy of promoting the growth of Russia's economy and military technology through support of the mining, metallurgical, textile, and shipbuilding industries. Only gradually did a rational central civil and military administration begin to emerge. Military administration did not assume a final and permanent form until the creation of the War and Admirality College during the last years of the Northern War. In the meantime Peter made do with a patchwork of institutions. It is no wonder that the material and human costs were so high since neither an effective administrative infrastructure nor trained personnel were at hand in adequate numbers to support and operate the new institutions.35 The long-term costs of this arrangement were particularly high. In his drive to create a modern military Peter sought to enhance the state's ability to draw upon society's resources. To achieve this Peter reforged the alliance between the autocratic state and the service gentry by strengthening the hold of serfdom upon the peasantry. After Peter both state and gentry were thoroughly committed to policing and immobilizing the peasantry to secure revenues, taxes, and recruits. Such an alliance was quite in keeping with Peter's conception of the absolutist state.36

Peter's concept of absolutism is most clearly revealed in his legislation: the Succession Law, Table of Ranks, the Deiree on the colleges, inheritance and the Military Regulations of 1716 and Naval Regulations of 1720. Traditionally, the study of all this legislation has turned on the historiographic question of foreign and domestic influences at work in their compilation. All scholars are agreed that Peter I took an active part in drafting the military and naval regulations. As Claes Peterson has pointed out, there is another sort of question that can be asked of the same material: to what end was Peter striving? What sort of state edifice did he envision? Peterson's answer, and it seems a compelling one, was a highly centralized, absolutist structure. Thus, his choice of Swedish institutions as a model for the colleges rested less upon the relative development of England and Holland--supposedly too advanced--versus Sweden--closer to Russia's institutional level--than to the centralist tendencies embodied in the legislation of Charies XI.37

The Naval Regulations of 1720 contain another clue as to Peter's conception of the absolutist state. The regulations contain an essay by Peter about the introduction of shipbuilding into Russia. Yet, its starting point is not technical, by dynastic-historical. Peter chose to link together in a single narrative a history of the Russian state from St. Vladimir's conversion, its struggle with the barbarians, the foundation of the Romanov dynasty to his own father's military and naval ventures with his own interests in naval affairs and shipbuilding from the discovery of the botik to his shipbuilding activities in England. For Peter, mastery of the naval arts and shipbuilding was of decisive importance to the welfare of Russia, the state that God himself had entrusted to him. Mastery of the sea through a new technology opened up to Peter what seemed to be new opportunities, new potentials for Russia. The cruise on the open sea at Archangel made this clear and the victory at Azov in 1696 confirmed it.38

For Peter the objective of his military and social policies was the enhancement of Russian power and the establishment of Russia among the great powers. In this vision Peter departed radically from the worldview of the Moscovite tsars, who had seen their possession of the Russian lands as a personal patrimony [votchina] and who had counted their agents as slaves.38 In Peter Russian absolutism took on a new guise as a transforming power and agent of social change. Peter counted himself as first servant of the state and expected all others to serve according to their abilities and place in society. The remarks attributed to him on the eve of Poltava reflect this new vision:

Let the Russian soldiers know that the hour has come in which the very existence of the whole fatherland is placed in their hands: either Russia will perish or she will be reborn for the better. They must think that they have been armed and drawn up into battle array, not for the sake of Peter, but for the sake of their kin and the whole Russian people, which until now has been protected by their arms, and which today awaits from them the final decision of its fortune. . . . And as for Peter, let them know for certain that his life is not dear to him, if only Russia and Russian piety, glory, and prosperity survive.

Peter, the complete soldier, cannot be disassociated from Peter the statesman. Indeed, it is no accident that the legal definition of autocracy which served the Empire into the twentieth century was taken from the Kniga ustav voinskii, military regulations, of 1716: "His majesty is an autocratic monarch who is not obliged to answer for his acts to anyone in this world; but he holds his might and power to administer his states and lands as a Christian monarch, in accordance with his wishes and best opinions."40 Peter, the soldier-statesman, infused into the Russian consciousness both a national awareness and a particularly militaristic definition of Russia's place among the great powers. His successes and those of his heirs, both tsarist and Soviet, in dealing with Russia's perceived vulnerability and backwardness have over the centuries reinforced the logic of military preparations, at a level deemed excessive by worried neighbors and at a cost of severe privation to society. Judgments about Peter's claims to be a soldier statesman of the enlightenment must remain controversial and depend in large measure upon the eye of the beholder. Many Westerners today might be tempted to sympathize with Frederick the Great's sentiments when he learned that Voltair had decided to write a history of Peter's reign. Frederick, whose position during the Seven Years War was desperate thanks in some measure to Russia's armed intervention, wrote:

"Tell me, what do you mean by writing a history of the wolves and bears of Siberia? What can you relate of the Tsar which cannot be found in the life of Charles XII? I shall not read the history of those barbarians; I wish I could ignore their existence in our hemisphere."

That reality makes it all the more essential that we understand the military dimensions of the Petrine state as it became an essential part of the international system in the early eighteenth century.

In such a context we should seek a universal historical significance for Peter outside either the Westernizer or nativist traditions. In this fashion he should be considered one of the first non-Western European statesmen to come effectively to grips with the military-technological superiority that Western Europeans had employed over the previons two centuries to establish a world-wide supremacy based upon maritime power. In mobilizing a vast continental state to meet this military-technological challenge Peter emphasized those attributes of the West which seemed to stand at the core of that threat to the exclusion of other more humane features.

Jacob W. Kipp
Kansas State University