PIETRO the Great, tsar of RUSSIA. — Born on 30 May 1672. His education was left to chance. From his earliest youth, passionate about military exercises, he organized, partly as a game and partly with serious intentions, the first nuclei of a modern army. Lively, healthy, rough, fond of drinking bouts, fascinated by modern technology, he brought numerous foreign “specialists” to Russia and then travelled extensively abroad (Holland, England, etc.) to learn about technical matters of every kind (he indeed visited shipyards, cannon factories, etc.). The repression he subsequently carried out against the strel’cy (who had rebelled during his absence from Russia and who, in his eyes, appeared to be a formation of praetorians bound to conservative interests) has remained famous for its cruelty (v. Storia). Under P. the G. Russia firmly established itself as a leading power. Through struggles whose fortunes varied, Swedish power was overthrown (decisive in this regard was the battle of Poltava). With the foundation of Petersburg, which became the capital of the modernized Empire, Russia wished to fling open the “window onto Europe.” Half of the aims of the Muscovite rulers, beginning with Ivan the Terrible, had been achieved. In the autumn of 1724, P. saw at the mouths of the Neva a ship battered by the storm. He hastened to help the shipwrecked, remaining immersed for a long time 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 January 1725.
P.’s reign, in Russia, is identified with the affirmation of the State, technology, and “life” (understood, ultimately, in a rather material sense, revealing a determined will to oppose the traditional world and “abstract contemplations”). Under P. the G., the State intended to reduce the Church to a function strictly consonant with its own aims. The European civilization known by P. was, above all, that which had come to reveal itself to him through the “foreign quarter” in Moscow: Prussian corporals, Parisian hairdressers, English and Dutch craftsmen and technicians. “Civilization” was identified by him chiefly with utilitarianism and mechanics. This great barbarian, passionate about the West’s technical progress, learned every trade, disdaining none. Under him, a State industry developed in Russia, especially in response to military needs. The cities too experienced considerable growth, although more often than not they took on the appearance of monotonous military and administrative centers. Particular development was given to schools, from which the future builders of roads and bridges, officers, technicians, doctors, and officials were to emerge. The student class itself arose by the will of the Tsar, beginning, from the years of study onward, to “serve” the State: thus, in a truly original way, the first embryos of the Russian intellighenzia came into being. P. the G., even in the face of his own autocratic whims, almost always allowed the concept of public utility to prevail. P.’s great reforms all bore, to a greater or lesser degree, a utilitarian and empirical character. His ideal of “progress” (which symptomatically anticipated the states of mind of future generations of Russian rationalists) was detached from humanitarian ideals (of an Enlightenment type) and from any aspiration toward some form of freedom. The reforms of the great Emperor proved to be tied to his person and survived him only in part.
In his reforms, often carried out by violent methods, P. refused to take into account even the opinion of the Church, which until then had constituted in Russia the supreme norm also for cultural and social life. Thus, on 20 December 1699, he replaced the Byzantine era which, with the year beginning on 1 September, 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 Cyrillic characters (v. ALFABETO), different from the ecclesiastical ones; he began founding state schools independent of the Church; he sent young people to study at foreign universities; and he imposed new customs on citizens (Western dress, shaving the beard, etc.), which until then in Russia had been practiced exclusively by Protestant or Catholic foreigners. This provoked opposition to his reforms from the clergy, headed by the patriarchs Gioacchino (d. 1699) Adriano (v.). P. took his revenge by grossly mocking them. Seeing that the growing opposition was concentrating around the Muscovite ecclesiastics, especially the monks, P. favored the clergy of southern Russia, which, having experienced Polish rule and cultural influence, was not so attached to Moscow’s cultural and social traditions. Among them there subsequently emerged Stefano Javorskij, appointed metropolitan of Rjazan; Teodosio Janovskij, made archbishop of Novgorod; and especially the Protestantizing Teofane Prokopovič (v.), who became bishop of Pskov and P.’s most listened-to adviser in ecclesiastical affairs. Although a believer, P. viewed religion in utilitarian terms, as an indispensable means for the moral formation of the people, without being overly concerned with its dogmatic content. Because of his ideal of an absolute and police state, inspired by the doctrines of Puffendorf, Wolf, and others, P. had little tolerance for the prestige and authority enjoyed by the patriarchs of Moscow among the entire people. When the patriarch Adriano died in 1700, P. did not permit the election of a successor, but appointed only an “exarch, administrator and vicar of the patriarchal throne” in the person of Stefano Javorskij. This provisional state ended only on 25 January 1721 with the publication of the Spiritual Regulation, drawn up by Teofane Prokopovič. The Regulation abolished the patriarchal dignity and entrusted supreme legislative, judicial, and administrative power to a “Spiritual Collegium,” organized in the manner of the other collegial departments of the State then instituted by P. The Spiritual Collegium, which soon took the name of the Most Holy Synod, was to consist of 12 members with equal votes, 4 bishops and 8 priests, appointed by the tsar, who remained the “supreme judge” of the S. Synod and, in that capacity, ratified all important acts issued by II. To exercise this control more easily, in 1722 P. appointed a layman as high procurator of the S. Synod. The Regulation also reorganized the administration of the dioceses, strengthening throughout the control of the state authority. A Supplement to the Regulation, issued in 1722, similarly reorganized the discipline of the parish clergy and monks, imposing onerous restrictions on the latter regarding the number of monasteries and novices. Although even before P. the tsars had not infrequently interfered in ecclesiastical affairs, P. made the S. Synod an organ of the state administration; bishops and priests became in practice government employees, to the serious detriment of their sacred authority. These new regulations, issued by P. in order to incorporate ecclesiastical administration into the machinery of the state bureaucracy, subsequently gravely hindered the free development of the activity of the Russian Church. Toward the Catholic Church P. harbored a distrustful aversion, considering the pope’s primacy incompatible with the absolute rule of sovereigns. When P. visited Paris in 1717, the theologians of the Sorbonne presented him with a memorandum concerning the union of the Eastern Church
with the Roman Church. In 1720, on P.’s instructions, Teofane Prokopovič replied to them, asserting that this could be discussed only in agreement with all the Eastern patriarchs.