PETER the Great, Tsar of RUSSIA. — B. 30 May 1672. His upbringing was left to chance. From early youth, passionate about military exercises, he organized, partly as a game and partly with serious intent, the first nuclei of a modern army. Lively, healthy, rough, fond of drinking, fascinated by modern technology, he brought numerous foreign “specialists” to Russia and then traveled extensively abroad (Holland, England, etc.) to learn technical matters of every kind (he visited shipyards, cannon foundries, etc.). The repression he subsequently carried out against the strel’tsy (who had rebelled during his absence from Russia and, in his eyes, appeared as a praetorian formation tied to conservative interests) remains notorious for its cruelty (v. RUSSIA, History). Under P. the Great, Russia firmly established itself as a leading power. Through struggles marked by alternating fortunes, Swedish power was overthrown (decisive in this regard was the Battle of Poltava). With the founding of St. Petersburg, which became the capital of the modernized Empire, Russia sought to open the “window onto Europe.” Half of the Muscovite sovereigns, beginning with Ivan the Terrible, had been reached. In the autumn of 1724, P. spotted a ship tossed by a storm at the mouth of the Neva. He hastened to aid the shipwrecked, remaining long immersed in the icy water and saving some twenty sailors and soldiers; but as a result of complications from a catarrh caused by this adventure, the Tsar died on 28 Jan. 1725.
P.’s reign in Russia is identified with the affirmation of the State, technology, and “life” (understood, in essence, in a rather material sense, revealing a decisive will to oppose the traditional world and “abstract contemplations”). With P. the Great, the State sought to reduce the Church to a function strictly aligned with its aims. The European civilization that P. knew was, more than anything, that which had manifested itself to him through the “Foreign Quarter” in Moscow: Prussian corporals, Parisian hairdressers, English and Dutch artisans and technicians. “Civilization,” in his eyes, was identified more with utilitarianism and mechanics. This great barbarian, passionate about the technical progress of the West, learned every trade without mastering any. Under him, state-run industry developed in Russia, especially to meet military needs. Cities also saw significant growth, though they often took on the appearance of monotonous military and administrative centers. Particular development was given to schools, from which were to emerge future road and bridge builders, officers, technicians, doctors, and officials. The student class itself arose by the will of the Tsar, beginning even in their years of study to “serve” the State; in this way, the first embryos of the Russian intelligentsia emerged in a truly original fashion. P. the Great, faced with his own autocratic whims, almost always upheld the concept of public utility. The great reforms of P. all bear more or less a utilitarian and empirical character. His ideal of “progress” (which in a symptomatic way foreshadowed the attitudes of future generations of Russian rationalists) was divorced from humanitarian ideals (of an Enlightenment type) and from any aspiration toward a form of freedom. The reforms of the great Emperor proved tied to his person and did not long survive him.
REFORM OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH. — P. did not receive the traditional education of the Russian tsars, for he spent his youth with his mother away from court, in the village of Preobrazhenskoe near Moscow. There he lived in familiarity with simple folk and with the Protestant foreigners of the nearby settlement “Meneckaja sloboda.” Thus, when P. became Tsar, he felt no attachment to the traditional Russian forms of political, social, and religious life, and among his closest collaborators and friends he had numerous Protestant foreigners.
In his reforms, often carried out by violent methods, PETER did not even wish to take into account the opinion of the Church, which until then had constituted in Russia the supreme norm even for cultural and social life. Thus, on 20 Dec. 1699, he replaced the Byzantine era, which began the year on 1 Sept. and counted the years “from the creation of the world,” with the era used in the West; he introduced for civil use a new type of critical characters (v. CYRILLIC, ALPHABET) different from the ecclesiastical ones, began to found state schools independent of the Church, sent young people to study at foreign universities, and imposed on citizens new customs (dressing à la française, shaving beards, etc.), hitherto practised in Russia exclusively by Protestant or Catholic foreigners. This provoked opposition to his reforms from the clergy, with the patriarchs IOACCHIN (d. 1690) and ADRIAN (v.) at their head. PETER revenged himself by openly mocking them. Seeing that the growing opposition centred around the Moscow ecclesiastics, especially monks, PETER favoured the clergy of southern Russia, which, having undergone Polish domination and cultural influence, was less attached to the cultural and social traditions of Moscow. Among them there later emerged STEPHEN YAVORSKY, appointed metropolitan of Ryazan, THEODOSIUS YANOVSKY, made archbishop of Novgorod, and especially THEOPHANE PROKOPOVICH (v.), who became bishop of Pskov and PETER’s most trusted counsellor in ecclesiastical affairs. Though a believer, PETER viewed religion in a utilitarian way, as an indispensable means for the moral formation of the people, without worrying too much about its dogmatic content. Because of his ideal of an absolute and police state, inspired by the doctrines of Puffendorf, Wolff, etc., PETER could ill tolerate the prestige and authority enjoyed by the Moscow patriarchs among the entire people. When the patriarch ADRIAN died in 1700, PETER did not permit the election of a successor but appointed only an “exarch, administrator and vicar of the patriarchal throne” in the person of STEPHEN YAVORSKY. This provisional state lasted until 25 Jan. 1721, when the Spiritual Regulation, drawn up by THEOPHANE PROKOPOVICH, was published. The Regulation abolished the patriarchal dignity and entrusted supreme legislative, judicial and administrative power to a “Spiritual College,” organised along the lines of the other collegial boards of state then instituted by PETER. The Spiritual College, which soon took the name of the Most Holy Synod, was to consist of 12 members with equal vote, 4 bishops and 8 priests appointed by the tsar, who remained the “supreme judge” of the Holy Synod and, as such, ratified all important acts issued by II. To exercise this control more easily, PETER in 1722 appointed a lay Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod. The Regulation reorganised the organisation of diocesan administration, reinforcing throughout the control of state authority. A Supplement to the Regulation, issued in 1722, likewise reorganised the discipline of parish clergy and monks, imposing on the latter honourable restrictions as to the number of convents and novices. Although even before PETER the tsars had not infrequently interfered in ecclesiastical affairs, PETER made the Holy Synod an organ of state administration; bishops and priests became practically government officials, with serious impairment of their sacred authority. These new regulations, issued by PETER to integrate ecclesiastical administration into the machinery of state bureaucracy, subsequently gravely hindered the free development of the activity of the Russian Church. Towards the Catholic Church PETER nourished a distrustful aversion, considering the primacy of the pope incompatible with the absolute rule of sovereigns. When in 1717 PETER visited Paris, the theologians of the Sorbonne presented him with a memorandum concerning the union of the Eastern Church with the Roman. In 1720, at PETER’s request, THEOPHANE PROKOPOVICH replied to them, affirming that this could be discussed only in agreement with all the Eastern patriarchs.