Government reform of Peter the Great

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter the Great's government reforms reshaped Russia from a medieval tsardom into something resembling the industrial nations of Western Europe, and he did it in less than three decades. Peter came to the throne at the age of ten in 1682, sharing power with his half-brother Ivan V. When Ivan died in 1696, the young tsar was suddenly free to act alone. What followed was one of the most sweeping overhauls any European ruler would attempt in the early modern era.

  The urgency was military. Russia was locked in the Great Northern War against Sweden, a conflict that ran from 1700 to 1721 and drained the country of money and men. The administrative system Peter had inherited was too clumsy to feed a war machine of that scale. But Peter saw something larger than logistics. On his Grand Embassy through Europe, he encountered nations that were richer, more organized, and more powerful than Russia, and he came home with a list of things to change.

  What he built touched nearly every Russian: the coins in peasants' pockets, the beards on noblemen's faces, the ranks on soldiers' uniforms, and the councils that governed every province. The Table of Ranks he created in 1722 would remain in force all the way to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

• 2. The War That Forced Change

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  Russia's victory in the Great Northern War came at a price that is almost hard to fathom. Historians described it as one of history's costliest conflicts at the time, consuming the financial and economic resources of every nation involved. For Russia, the strain exposed a fundamental problem: the administrative system Peter inherited was designed for peacetime tax collection, not for sustaining a decades-long war across the Baltic.

  The Russia Peter ruled in 1700 was vast in territory and rich in natural resources, but corruption and inefficiency ate into both. Revenue could not be gathered quickly enough, and the money that was gathered often vanished before it reached the front. Peter understood that winning the war against Sweden meant first winning a quieter battle at home, against the inertia of his own bureaucracy.

  Peter's Grand Embassy, known in Russian as the Velikoye posol'stvo, was the turning point. Traveling through the more developed nations of Western Europe, Peter conducted negotiations aimed at strengthening Russia's position against both Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. He also watched how those nations ran themselves. The gap between their administrative capacity and Russia's own convinced him that reform was not optional. He returned with an agenda to build what he later called a well-ordered police state, one that could project power as efficiently as the nations he had visited.

• 3. Breaking the Boyars

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  Russia's elite nobility, the Boyars, had dominated the country's politics for generations. Their influence had been eroding since the reign of Ivan the Terrible, but the Boyar Duma, the advisory council to the tsar, still wielded considerable power in Peter's time. Peter saw the Boyars as an obstacle to Europeanization, stressing Slavic supremacy and resisting the reforms he believed Russia needed.

  His response was methodical and, at times, almost spiteful. He taxed their cultural habits directly, including a specific tax on wearing beards, a mark of traditional Russian identity the Boyars prized. He obligated them to state service. Where they had once inherited power by birth, Peter's new system demanded that they earn it.

  The decisive blow came in 1722 with the Table of Ranks, a formal hierarchy of positions in the military, government, and royal court. Each rank was assigned a number from I to XIV, reflecting a specific level of service to the tsar. High office was no longer a matter of bloodline. A commoner with sufficient skill and hard work could climb the hierarchy and displace someone born into aristocracy. A new generation of technocrats rose through the system, and they supplanted the old Boyar class in the civil service almost entirely.

• 4. Governing a Vast Land

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  Before Peter's reforms, Russia was divided into units called uyezds, each consisting of a city and the territory immediately around it. The system split the population unevenly and was, by accounts of the era, extremely clumsy to administer. In 1708, Peter swept it away and replaced it with eight governorates, called guberniyas: Moscow, Ingermanland, Kiev, Smolensk, Archangelgorod, Kazan, Azov, and Siberian.

  Each governorate was placed under a royally appointed governor. A further decree in 1713 established Landrats in each of them, taking the name from the German word for national council. Between eight and twelve professional civil servants staffed each Landrat, assisting the governor and providing a layer of administration that had not existed before.

  On the 22nd of February 1711, Peter created the Governing Senate, known in Russian as the Pravitel'stvuyushchiy Senat. Its ten original members were appointed personally by Peter from among his own associates. The list included Count Ivan Musin-Pushkin, Boyar Tikhon Streshnev, Prince Pyotr Golitsin, Prince Mikhail Dolgorukov, and Ober-secretary Anisim Shchukin, among others. All appointments and resignations required personal imperial decrees. On the 12th of December 1717, Peter added nine collegia, or administrative boards, which replaced the older Prikazs. The Collegium of War was headed by Prince Alexander Menshikov; the Collegium of the Navy by Count Fyodor Apraksin; the Collegium of Commerce by Count Pyotr Tolstoy. Each collegium had a president and, in most cases, a vice-president.

• 5. Taxing Everything

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  Fighting the Great Northern War required money on a scale Russia had never managed, and Peter's treasury was in a state of near-constant crisis. His first response was to monopolize industries the state could not afford to leave to private hands: salt, vodka, oak, and tar all came under government control. He then turned to taxes on cultural practices, levying fees on bathing, fishing, beekeeping, and the wearing of beards, and issuing tax stamps for paper goods.

  The problem was that each new tax generated new workarounds. Peasants had long evaded a land-based household tax by consolidating several households into a single estate, shrinking the number of taxable units. Peter closed that gap with a poll tax, assessed per individual rather than per household. Each peasant now owed 70 kopeks, paid in cash. The burden was heavier than what it replaced, but the result was dramatic. Russia's treasury expanded almost sixfold between 1680 and 1724.

  Peter paired the new taxes with a proto-protectionist trade policy, placing heavy tariffs on imports to shelter Russian-made goods. He also pursued monetary reform, introducing copper coinage and reducing the silver content of a ruble from 40 grams to 28 grams. The new ruble was calibrated to match the contemporary thalers used elsewhere in Europe. By 1704, the reformed currency was fully in place, with coins for units including the polushka (a quarter-kopek), the denga (half-kopek), the altyn (3 kopeks), the grivna (10 kopeks), the poltina (50 kopeks), and the ruble itself at 100 kopeks. In 1707, British envoy Charles Whitworth recorded that 110 kopeks bought 1 British crown, worth 5 shillings, whereas previously 1 ruble had been worth 10 shillings.

• 6. Serfs and the Social Order

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  Peter's reforms did not reach the lowest rungs of Russian society with anything like generosity. He believed that social classes should be locked in place: as he put it, just as the landowner was tied to state service and the townsman to his trade, so the peasant was tied to the land. Estate-owners received broad new rights, including the power to prevent any serf from leaving without written permission.

  His new tax code expanded the pool of taxable workers, shifting more of the financial burden onto people who could least absorb it. The gap between serfs and outright slaves narrowed so completely under Peter that by the end of his reign the two were, in practical terms, barely distinguishable.

  Some of Peter's advisers recommended going further in the opposite direction, urging the abolition of serfdom and the creation of a form of limited freedom. That reality did not arrive until two centuries later. Peter did create a category called state peasants, serfs who paid dues directly to the state and enjoyed somewhat broader rights than those bound to private landowners. He also established state-sanctioned handicraft shops in large cities, modeled on workshops he had seen in the Netherlands, supplying goods for the army. The tension between these two impulses, toward modernization and toward deepening servitude, would define Russian society long after Peter was gone.

• 7. A Legacy in Law and Institutions

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  Peter's reforms were codified in a series of royal decrees called ukazy, singular ukaz, a word that translates literally as imposition. Most were issued between 1700 and 1721, the span of the Great Northern War, though the Table of Ranks arrived a year after the war ended, in 1722.

  The scope of legislation under Peter was unlike anything his predecessors had attempted. Before his reign, the functions of the Muscovite state were largely confined to military defense, tax collection, and enforcing class hierarchy. Under Peter, legislation reached into nearly every corner of daily life. The reforms strengthened Russia's capacity to fight the Great Northern War and helped produce the victory that gave Russia control of the Baltic Sea and significant influence in Central and Eastern Europe.

  The institutions Peter created did not dissolve when he died. The Table of Ranks remained in effect, with minimal modification, until the Russian Revolution of 1917. Public institutions in both the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation traced their founding to Peter's rule, including Moscow State University.