Peter I

In these early days Peter would very willingly have made peace with his formidable rival if he had been allowed to retain these comparatively modest conquests. From 1707 to 1709 the war on his part was purely defensive; Charles would not hear of peace till full restitution had been made and a war indemnity paid, while Peter was fully resolved to perish rather than sur render his "paradise," Petersburg. After Pultava (June 26, 1709), Peter, hitherto commendably cautious even to cowardice, but now puffed up with pride, rashly plunged into as foolhardy an enter prise as ever his rival engaged in. The campaign of the Pruth (March to July 1711) must have been fatal to the 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 conclu sion 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 with them the hegemony of the north, and her pretensions to be considered a great power.

Reforms.

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 grad ually growing up among the cumbrous, antiquated, worn-out ma chinery 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 regen erator 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 2722, 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 admin istration. Still later came the "Spiritual Department," or "Holy Synod" (January 1721), which superseded the ancient patriarch ate. 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." The official birthday of the Russian empire was Oct. 22, 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 primogeni ture 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 Nov. 25, 1723 he issued a second manifesto explaining at some length why he was taking such an unusual step. The whole nation listened aghast to the manifesto. The coronation of a woman was in the eyes of the Russian people a scandalous innovation, and the proposed coronation was doubly scandalous in view of the base origin of Catherine herself. (See CATHERINE I.) The ceremony took place at Moscow on May 7, During the last four years of his reign Peter's policy was pre dominantly 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 resulted in the acquisition of the towns of Baku and Derbent and the Caspian provinces of Gilan, Mazan daran and Astarabad. The Persian campaigns wore out Peter's health. 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 died after terrible suffering, on Jan. 28, 2725.

Character.

Peter's claim to greatness rests mainly on his recognition of 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 he was determined that, at whatever cost, hardship and inconvenience, Russia should be ruled by Russians, not by foreigners ; and before his death every important place in his empire was in the hands of capable Russians of his own training. 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 pos sessed, 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 pas sions as well as the wide views of his prototypes. Al: 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 illuminat ing glimpses, extorts from time to time an all-forgiving admiration. Strange, too, as it may sound, Peter the Great was at heart pro foundly religious. Few men have ever had a more intimate per suasion that they were but instruments for good in the hands of God.