Reforms

Peter’s reforms of government are easy to confuse with the rest of his legend: the long war in the north, the new capital on the Neva, the ladder of ranks that later defined imperial honour. This chapter is none of those stories. It is about the machinery that was supposed to make a vast country answer one will. The year had to be counted as Europe counted it. Dress and beards had to show that private faces belonged to public policy. Letters for secular print had to shed Church Slavonic forms. A Senate had to sit when the tsar was away. Colleges had to replace the tangled prikaz offices. Provinces had to be large enough to tax and recruit. The Church, after Patriarch Adrian, had to live without a new patriarch and, in time, under a Holy Synod the state could watch. None of this was a museum of good intentions. It was a programme for making autocracy effective, written into calendars, clothes, boards and dioceses.

The method was blunt. Peter did not wait for offices to educate themselves; he issued edicts, posted guards on civil business, and treated resistance as dirt to be scraped off the realm.

From 1 January 1700 Russia was to number the year as western Europe numbered it, from the birth of Christ, not from the Creation of the World, and the year was to open in January rather than on 1 September. Peter kept the Julian reckoning of days rather than the Gregorian calendar already used in Catholic Europe, so the alignment was partial and practical. Clerks, priests and merchants now inhabited a new public time. A date on a contract, a feast in a parish, a dispatch from a governor: all had to learn the same arithmetic. The change looks small until one remembers that a calendar is how a state tells people when they live. To alter it was to say that Muscovy’s clock had been wrong for everyone, at once. After this, a wrong date was not a local habit. It was a failure to obey.

Dress and hair were treated with the same seriousness. Peter decreed that beards should be shorn and Western coats worn in place of the long kaftany of the elite. He personally cut the beards of boyars and the skirts of those coats, turning a toilet into a lesson in rank. Old Believers and merchants who insisted on keeping their beards paid a special tax; peasants and the Orthodox clergy were allowed to remain bearded. The policy was not a joke about fashion. It marked who belonged to the service world the tsar meant to build, and who might still look like the old country. Later genre pictures like to show a crowded, theatrical humiliation in a Kremlin anteroom. The object that opens this chapter is quieter and more exact: a token carried to prove the tax had been paid. It is still not a scene from 1698. It is the decree made into copper.

In 1710 the alphabet used for secular print was modernised into a civil script, stripped of some of the Church Slavonic forms that had made ordinary type look like liturgy. Religious books could keep their older face. Gazettes, manuals, translations and decrees were to look like the work of a state, not of a choir. The first Russian newspaper, Vedomosti, had already appeared in 1703; civil type gave such print a public body of its own. A reader could now see, in the letter-shapes themselves, a line between the Church’s books and the government’s. Type, in this programme, was another uniform.

In 1711 Peter abolished the boyar council, the boyarskaya duma, and established by decree a Senate as the supreme organ of state. It was to coordinate central and local offices, watch the collection and spending of revenue, and draft legislation according to his edicts. He was often away; the Senate was meant to be a brain that kept working in his absence. Martial discipline was extended to civil institutions. An officer of the guards was always on duty in the Senate, a reminder that civil paper lived under military eyes. From 1722 a procurator general watched the Senate’s daily work and its chancellery, acting as the eye of the sovereign. The old counsel of great families was replaced by a body that existed to execute, coordinate and be inspected. Advice had become homework.

Paintings of the Senate in session are later reconstructions. They arrange wigs, maps and a commanding emptiness as if a single morning could be recovered. What they cannot show is the guard at the door, the procurator’s watch, or the pile of business a travelling emperor expected to find done when he returned.

When Peter came to power the central departments were the prikazy, some eighty offices working in a confused and fragmented way, overlapping, starving one another of paper, and answering to habits older than his reign. From 1718 he instituted nine colleges, or boards, to replace most of that tangle; by 1722 their number had grown to thirteen. A коллегия, a kollegia, was not a minister with a private empire. It was a board meant to sit, argue, minute and share blame according to regulations, so that a department would outlast any one favourite. War, the navy, foreign affairs, revenue, expenditure, mines, manufactures and other branches of business each received, in time, this collegiate form. The General Regulation and particular rules for each college were supposed to tell every official what to do, and to leave ignorance as no excuse.

The Twelve Collegia on Vasilyevsky Island was begun in Peter’s reign to house those boards. The long red-and-white façade in the photograph is a later view, taken from St Isaac’s in 2007. Use it to see the idea of colleges given a building. Do not mistake a finished imperial block for a 1722 construction site.

The point of a board was control as much as expertise. Several men signed; a regulation constrained them; another office might audit them. In practice a strong president could still dominate a table, and corruption did not die because the furniture had changed. Crimes against the state remained outside this collegiate politeness, under the Preobrazhensky Office, which answered immediately to the tsar. The form still mattered. It announced that ordinary government would be a set of named functions, not a forest of prikaz custom, while the sharpest political cases stayed on a shorter leash.

The same appetite for named functions reached the map. In 1708 Russia was divided into eight guberniyas, or governments, each under a governor appointed by the tsar and given administrative, military and judicial authority. The first set was huge: Moscow, Ingermanland, Kiev, Smolensk, Archangelgorod, Kazan, Azov and Siberia, territories defined more by assigned towns than by surveyed borders. In 1719 those governments were reworked into fifty provinces, smaller units meant to make tax and recruitment less of a guess. A governor was to be a working arm, not a decorative viceroy. Distance, thin staffs and local habits ate the neatness of the edict almost as soon as it was issued. Yet the guberniya entered Russian government as a lasting idea: a large territorial machine with a man at its head who answered upward, not a patchwork of older districts waiting on Moscow clerks.

The Church was the last great independent office in this landscape. When Patriarch Adrian died in 1700, Peter allowed no successor to be chosen. For two decades the patriarchal see stood vacant while other hands managed what the patriarchate had been. The delay was policy, not forgetfulness. A patriarch could become a rival centre of authority, a possibility Peter had reason, from his father’s reign, to take seriously. He was a practising Orthodox Christian who attended services. He was not willing to let the Church rule the lives his reforms meant to commandeer, nor to leave monastic houses as refuges from the service he was making compulsory elsewhere. The vacancy taught bishops that the head of the Church might simply not be replaced.

In 1721, in order to subject the Orthodox Church to the state, Peter abolished the Patriarchate of Moscow. The patriarch’s place was taken by a spiritual college, the Holy Synod, made up of representatives of the hierarchy obedient to the tsar’s will. A secular official, the ober-prokuror or chief procurator, was appointed to supervise its work. The purpose was not hidden: to put the Church under the state. The Synod persecuted dissenters and censored publications. Peter disposed of ecclesiastical and monastic property and revenues for state purposes at his discretion. Priests were expected to preach obedience as well as salvation, and to help the peasantry, in the language of the programme, listen to reason. Men under thirty and serfs were not to be received easily as monks. The Church remained Orthodox. It was fitted into the autocracy as a department that could bless, register, warn and yield income. Later paintings and later façades of synod buildings are aftermath. They do not recover 1721.

He did not ask the old offices to modernise themselves; he replaced them with rooms he could enter.

The Senate, the colleges, the guberniyas and the Synod were four versions of one thought. A travelling ruler needed institutions that continued in his absence and still feared his return. Paper, guards and a lay procurator were how that fear was organised. So were the calendar, the cut coat and the civil letter: public signs that the old private world of custom had been put on notice. Taken one by one they can look like hobbies. Taken together they are a single administrative appetite, reaching from the New Year to the altar.

Limits showed at once. Provincial reform did not conjure trained officials from empty districts. Colleges could still be captured by a strong man or starved by a weak one. The Synod could sit and still not make every parish into a school of loyalty. A governor might hold military, administrative and judicial power on paper and still fail to find the men, carts and coin an edict assumed were there. What changed was the claim. Henceforth the state would describe itself as a set of boards, governments and a church college, not as a tsar advised by boyars and a patriarch. Description is not the same as daily power. It is how later power learns its job, and how later clerks learn which door to knock on.

By the last years of the reign a Russian subject might live in a new year, under a governor of a guberniya, taxed towards colleges he would never see, hearing a priest who answered a Synod rather than a patriarch. He might still farm as his father had farmed. The machinery was real. So was the gap between edict and village. Other stories in this chapter follow the people who rose inside that machinery, and the price of building it. Those are other doors. This one is the lock: how a state learned to name its rooms, date its letters, cut a beard as policy, and put a watchman in the church.