Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia

PETER THE GREAT, Tsar of Russia. - B. May 30, 1672. His education was left to chance. From his earliest youth, passionate about military exercises, he organized, partly as a game, partly with serious intent, the first nuclei of a modern army. Lively, healthy, rough, given with pleasure to drinking bouts, fascinated by modern technology, he brought numerous foreign "specialists" to Russia and then traveled for a long time abroad (Holland, England, etc.) to learn technical problems 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 as a formation of praetorians tied to conservative interests) has remained famous for its cruelty (v. RUSSIA, History). Under P. the Great, Russia firmly established itself as a first-rate power. Through struggles, unfolding with varying fortunes, Swedish power was brought down (decisive, in this regard, was the battle of Poltava). With the founding of Petersburg, which became the capital of the modernized Empire, Russia sought to throw wide the "window on Europe." The goal of half the Muscovite sovereigns, starting from Ivan the Terrible, had been attained. In the autumn of 1724, P. caught sight at the mouth of the Neva of a ship battered by the storm. He hastened to help the shipwrecked, remaining for a long time immersed in the icy water and saving some twenty sailors and soldiers: but following the complications of a catarrh caused by this adventure, the tsar died on Jan. 28, 1725.

The reign of P. is identified, in Russia, with the affirmation of the State, of technology, of "life" (understood, at bottom, in a rather material sense, which reveals a decided will to set itself against the traditional world and against "abstract contemplations"). The State, with P. the Great, intended to reduce the Church to a function strictly concordant with its own ends. The European civilization that P. knew was, more than anything else, that which had come to be revealed to him through the "foreign quarter" in Moscow: Prussian corporals, Parisian wigmakers, English and Dutch artisans and technicians. "Civilization" was identified by him more than anything else with utilitarianism and mechanics. This great barbarian, passionate about the technical progress of the West, learned all the trades, disdaining none. Under him, a state industry developed in Russia, especially in function of military necessities. The cities too had a notable increase, though most of the time they took on the appearance of monotonous military and administrative centers. Particular development was given to schools, from which were to come the future builders of roads and bridges, the officers, the technicians, the doctors, the officials. The student class itself was born by the will of the Tsar, beginning, from the very years of study, to "render service" for the State: thus there arose in a truly original way the first embryos of the Russian intelligentsia. P. the Great, in the face of his own caprices as autocrat, almost always made the concept of public utility prevail. The great reforms of P. all bear, more or less, a utilitarian and empirical character. His ideal of "progress" (which symptomatically anticipates states of mind of future generations of Russian rationalists) is divorced from humanitarian ideals (of the Enlightenment type) and from the aspiration to some form of liberty. The reforms of the great Emperor proved to be tied to his person and did not survive him except partially.

Wolf Giusti

REFORM OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH - P. did not receive the traditional education of Russian tsareviches, because he spent his youth with his mother far from the court, in the village of Preobrazhenskoye near Moscow. There he lived on familiar terms with simple people and with the Protestant foreigners of the neighboring settlement "Nemeckaja sloboda." Therefore P., having become tsar, felt no attachment to the traditional Russian forms of political, social and religious life, and among his most intimate collaborators and friends he had numerous Protestant foreigners.

In his reforms, often carried out by violent methods, P. was unwilling to take into account even the opinion of the Church, which until then constituted in Russia the supreme norm also for cultural and social life. Thus on 20 Dec. 1699 he replaced the Byzantine era, which, beginning the year 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. CIRILLICO, ALFABETO) different from the ecclesiastical ones, began to found state schools independent of the Church, sent young men to study at foreign universities, imposed on citizens new customs (dressing in the Western manner, shaving the beard, etc.), until then practiced in Russia exclusively by Protestant or Catholic foreigners. This aroused opposition to his reforms on the part of the clergy, with the patriarchs Joachim (d. 1699) and Adrian (v.) at its head. P. took revenge on them by grossly mocking them. Seeing that the growing opposition was concentrated around the Moscow ecclesiastics, especially monks, P. favored the clergy of southern Russia, which, having undergone the dominion and cultural influence of Poland, did not cling so much to the cultural and social traditions of Moscow. Among them there later emerged Stefan Yavorsky, appointed metropolitan of Ryazan, Feodosy Yanovsky, made archbishop of Novgorod, and especially the Protestantizing Feofan Prokopovich (v.), who became bishop of Pskov and the most listened-to adviser of P. in ecclesiastical affairs. P., although a believer, regarded religion utilitarianism, as an indispensable means for the moral formation of the people, without worrying too much about its dogmatic content. Because of his ideal of the absolute and police state, inspired by the doctrines of Pufendorf, Wolff, etc., P. ill tolerated the prestige and authority enjoyed by the patriarchs of Moscow among all the people. When in 1700 the patriarch Adrian died, 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 Stefan Yavorsky. This provisional state ended only on 25 Jan. 1721 with the publication of the Spiritual Regulation, drawn up by Feofan Prokopovich. The Regulation abolished the patriarchal dignity and entrusted the supreme legislative, judicial and administrative power to a "Spiritual College," organized in the manner of the other collegial departments of the State instituted at that time by P. The Spiritual College, which soon took the name of the Most Holy Synod, was to be composed of 12 members with equal vote, 4 bishops and 8 priests, appointed by the tsar, who remained "supreme judge" of the Holy Synod and as such ratified all important acts issued by it. To exercise this control more easily P. in 1722 appointed a layman as high procurator of the Holy Synod. The Regulation also reorganized the organization of diocesan administration, strengthening throughout the control of state authority. A Supplement to the Regulation, issued in 1722, similarly reorganized the discipline of the parochial clergy and of monks, imposing on the latter burdensome limitations as to the number of convents and novices. Although even before P. the tsars had not infrequently meddled in ecclesiastical affairs, P. made the Holy Synod an organ of state administration; bishops and priests became practically government employees with grave detriment to their sacred authority. These new ordinances, issued by P. to insert the ecclesiastical administration into the machinery of the state bureaucracy, later seriously hindered the free development of the activity of the Russian Church. Toward the Catholic Church P. nourished a distrustful aversion, considering the primacy of the pope incompatible with the absolute dominion of sovereigns. When in 1717 P. visited Paris, the theologians of the Sorbonne presented him with a memorial concerning the union of the Eastern Church with that of Rome. In 1720, on P.'s commission, Feofan Prokopovich replied to them, affirming that this could be treated only in agreement with all the Eastern patriarchs.

Giuseppe Olbr