tsar but for the incalculable behaviour of the omnipotent grand vizier, who let the Russian army go at the very instant when it lay helpless in the hollow of his hand. Even so, Peter, by the peace of the Pruth, had to sacrifice all that he had gained by the Azov expedition fifteen years previously. On receiving the tidings of the conclusion of the peace of Nystad (August 30, 1721), Peter declared, with perfect justice, that it was the most profitable peace Russia had ever concluded. The gain to Russia was, indeed, much more than territorial. In surrendering the pick of her Baltic provinces, Sweden had surrendered along with them the hegemony of the north, and all her pretensions to be considered a great power.
The Great Northern War was primarily a training school for a backward young nation, and in the second place a means of multiplying the material resources of a nation as poor as she was backward. During the whole course of it the process of internal domestic reformation had been slowly but unceasingly proceeding. Brand-new institutions on Western models were gradually growing up among the cumbrous, antiquated, worn-out machinery of old Muscovy; and new men, like Menshikov, Goloykin, Apraksin, Osterman, Kurakin, Tolstoy, Shafirov, Prokopovich, Yaguszhinsky, Yavorsky, all capable, audacious, and brimful of new ideas, were being trained under the eye of the great regenerator to help him to carry on his herculean task. At first the external form of the administration remained much the same as before. The old dignities disappeared of their own accord with the deaths of their holders, for the new men, those nearest to Peter, did not require them. “The Administrative Senate” was not introduced till 1711, and only then because the interminable war, which required Peter’s prolonged absence from Russia, made it impossible for him to attend to the details of the domestic administration. Still later came the “Spiritual Department,” or “Holy Synod” (January 1721), which superseded the ancient patriarchate. It was established, we are told, “because simple folks cannot distinguish the spiritual power from the sovereign power, and suppose that a supreme spiritual pastor is a second sovereign, the spiritual authority being regarded as higher and better than the temporal.” From the first the regenerator in his ukazes was careful to make everything quite plain. He was always explaining why he did this or that, why the new was better than the old, and so on; and we must recollect that these were the first lessons of the kind the nation had ever received. The whole system of Peter was deliberately directed against the chief evils from which old Muscovy had always suffered, such as dissipation of energy, dislike of co-operation, absence of responsibility, lack of initiative, the tyranny of the family, the insignificance of the individual. The low social morality of all classes, even when morality was present at all, necessitated the regeneration of the nation against its will, and the process could therefore only be a violent one. Yet the most enlightened of Peter’s contemporaries approved of and applauded his violence; some of them firmly believed that his most energetic measures were not violent enough. Thus Ivan Poroshkov, Peter’s contemporary, the father of Russian political economy, writes as follows: “If any land be over-much encumbered with weeds, corn cannot be sown thereon unless the weeds first be burned with fire. In the same way, our ancient inveterate evils should also be burnt with fire.” Peter himself carried this principle to its ultimate limits in dealing with his unfortunate son the Tsarevich Alexius (q.v.). From an ethical and religious point of view the deliberate removal of Alexius was an abominable, an inhuman crime: Peter justified it as necessary for the welfare of the new Russia which he had called into existence.
The official birthday of the Russian empire was the 22nd of October 1721, when, after a solemn thanksgiving service in the Troitsa Cathedral for the peace of Nystad, the tsar proceeded to the senate and was there acclaimed: “Father of the Fatherland, Peter the Great, and Emperor of All Russia.” Some Russians would have preferred to proclaim Peter as emperor of the East; but Peter himself adopted the more patriotic title.
Towards the end of the reign the question of the succession to the throne caused the emperor some anxiety. The rightful heir, in the natural order of primogeniture, was the little grand duke Peter, son of the Tsarevich Alexius, a child of six, but Peter decided to pass him over in favour of his own beloved consort Catherine. The ustav, or ordinance of 1722, heralded this unheard-of innovation. Time-honoured custom had hitherto reckoned primogeniture in the male line as the best title to the Russian crown; in the ustav of 1722 Peter denounced primogeniture in general as a stupid, dangerous, and even unscriptural practice of dubious origin. The ustav was but a preliminary step to a still more sensational novelty. Peter had resolved to crown his consort empress, and on the 15th of November 1723 he issued a second manifesto explaining at some length why he was taking such an unusual step. That he should have considered any explanation necessary demonstrates that he felt himself to be treading on dangerous ground. The whole nation listened aghast to the manifesto. The coronation of a woman was in the eyes of the Russian people a scandalous innovation in any case, and the proposed coronation was doubly scandalous in view of the base and disreputable origin of Catherine herself (see Catherine I.). But Peter had his way, and the ceremony took place at Moscow with extraordinary pomp and splendour on the 7th of May 1724.
During the last four years of his reign Peter’s policy was predominantly Oriental. He had got all he wanted in Europe, but the anarchical state of Persia at the beginning of 1722 opened up fresh vistas of conquest. The war which lasted from May 1722 to September 1723 was altogether successful, resulting in the acquisition of the towns of Baku and Derbent and the Caspian provinces of Gilan, Mazandaran and Astarabad. The Persian campaigns wore out the feeble health of Peter, who had been ailing for some time. A long and fatiguing tour of inspection over the latest of his great public works, the Ladoga Canal, during the autumn of 1724, brought back another attack of his paroxysms, and he reached Petersburg too ill to rally again, though he showed himself in public as late as the 16th of January 1725. He expired in the arms of his consort, after terrible suffering, on the 28th of January 1725.
Peter’s claim to greatness rests mainly on the fact that from first to last he clearly recognized the requirements of the Russian nation and his own obligations as its ruler. It would have materially lightened his task had he placed intelligent foreigners at the head of every department of state, allowing them gradually to train up a native bureaucracy. But for the sake of the independence of the Russian nation he resisted the temptation of taking this inviting but perilous short-cut to greatness. He was determined that, at whatever cost, hardship and inconvenience, Russia should be ruled by Russians, not by foreigners; and before his death he had the satisfaction of seeing every important place in his empire in the hands of capable natives of his own training. But even in his most sweeping reforms he never lost sight of the idiosyncrasies of the people. He never destroyed anything which he was not able to replace by something better. He possessed, too, something of the heroic nature of the old Russian bogatuirs, or demigods, as we see them in the skazki and the builinui. His expansive nature loved width and space. No doubt this last of the bogatuirs possessed the violent passions as well as the wide views of his prototypes. All his qualities, indeed, were on a colossal scale. His rage was cyclonic: his hatred rarely stopped short of extermination. His banquets were orgies, his pastimes convulsions. He lived and he loved like one of the giants of old. There are deeds of his which make humanity shudder, and no man equally great has ever descended to such depths of cruelty and treachery. Yet it may generally be allowed that a strain of nobility, of which we occasionally catch illuminating glimpses, extorts from time to time an all-forgiving admiration. Strange, too, as it may sound, Peter the Great was at heart profoundly religious. Few men have ever had a more intimate persuasion that they were but instruments for good in the hands of God.
