Peter also introduced single inheritance of real estate (1714), attempting in this way to break the traditional inheritance pattern that had led to the splintering of estates. In so doing he hoped to create a professional service nobility unconnected with the land and totally devoted to the state, but the resistance the law met in its application forced its revocation in 1731. He also required the nobility to be educated as a prerequisite for service. Schooling, whether at home or in an institution, became a feature of the nobleman's way of life. Schooling was a radical innovation, at first resented and resisted; but within a generation it was accepted as a matter of course and became the decisive element in the status and self-image of the nobility.
The peasantry had been enserfed during the 17th century, but the individual peasant had retained his traditional ties to the village commune and to the land that he worked. To prevent tax evasion through the formation of artificial households, Peter introduced a new unit of taxation, the “soul”—i.e., a male peasant of working age—and the lords were made responsible for the collection of the tax assessed on each of their souls. The peasant thus became a mere item on the tax roll who could be moved, sold, or exchanged according to the needs and whims of his master—whether a private landlord, the church, or the state. The serf became practically indistinguishable from a slave.
As befitted a secular-minded autocrat who saw his main task as enlightening and leading his people to “modernity,” Peter had little regard for the church. He recognized its value only as an instrument of control and as an agent of modern education. When the patriarch died in 1700, Peter appointed no successor. Finally in 1721 he gave the church a bureaucratic organization: a Holy Synod composed of several appointed hierarchs and a lay representative of the emperor; the latter, called the chief procurator, came to play the dominant role. Ecclesiastical schools turned into closed institutions with a narrowly scholastic curriculum. Membership in the clerical estate became strictly hereditary; the priesthood was transformed into a closed caste of government religious servants cut off from the new secular culture being introduced in Russia and deprived of their traditional moral authority. Both on economic and religious grounds, therefore, the reign of Peter I appeared particularly oppressive to the common people. It seemed unnatural and contrary to tradition; for many it clearly was the reign of the Antichrist, from which one escaped only through self-immolation (practiced by some of the Old Believers (Old Believer)), open rebellion, or flight to the borderlands of the empire.
Resistance and flight were made possible by Peter's failure, despite all his modernizing and rationalizing, to endow the government with effective means of control on the local level. Regular officials were short in number and experience and could not be easily spared for local administration. Peter tried to have the officers of the regiments that were garrisoned in the provinces double as local officials, but the experiment failed because of the necessities of war and because regular officers proved incompetent to administer peasants. The attempts at copying Western models were also unsuccessful, for the Russian nobility lacked (and was not allowed to develop) a local corporate organization that could serve as the foundation for local self-government.
Peter concentrated his attention almost entirely on the central administration, for which his reforms provided the basic framework within which the imperial government was to operate until its fall in 1917. To prosecute the war, the Petrine state had to mobilize all the resources of the country and to supervise practically every aspect of national life. This required that the central executive apparatus be extended and organized along functional lines. Peter hoped to accomplish this by replacing the numerous haphazard prikazy (administrative departments) with a coherent system of functional and well-ordered colleges (their number fluctuating around 12 in the course of the century). Each college was headed by a board for more effective control; it had authority in a specific area such as foreign affairs, the army, the navy, commerce, mining, finances, justice, and so on. The major problems with this form of organization proved to be the coordination, planning, and supervision of the colleges.
Peter tried to cope with these defects pragmatically through the creation of a Senate, which came to serve as a privy council as well as an institution of supervision and control. In addition, he set up a network of agents (fiskaly) who acted as tax inspectors, investigators, and personal representatives of the emperor.
Much reliance was put on the obligation to denounce all would-be violators of imperial orders. Those failing to do so suffered the same punishment as the actual violator, while the informer was rewarded with the property confiscated from the “criminal.” Internal security was vested in 1689 in the chancery of the Preobrazhensky Guards, the tsar's own regiment, which became a much-dreaded organ of political police and repression. Under different names the police apparatus remained a permanent feature of the imperial regime. The police were also the instrument of the ruler's personal intervention, an essential function for the preservation of the autocracy as a viable political system.
The needs of war, as well as the desire to modernize (economic development) Russia, led Peter to promote and expand industry (industrialization), particularly mining, naval construction, foundries, and the production of glass and textiles. The emperor aimed at maximizing the use of all potential resources of the country to heighten its power and further its people's welfare; these goals were pursued in mercantilist fashion through discriminatory tariffs, state subsidies, and regulation of manufactures. Peter hoped to involve the rich merchants and the nobility in economic enterprise and expansion. As a class, however, the merchants failed to follow his lead; many were Old Believers who refused to work for what they considered the Antichrist. Nor did Peter's urban legislation provide the townspeople with the incentives and freedom necessary to change them into an entrepreneurial class; as a matter of fact, the municipal reforms were simply means to collect taxes and dues in kind. As to the nobility, only a few had the necessary capital to become entrepreneurs, and their time and energies were completely taken up by their service obligations. Nor did Peter provide for the security of property and for the landowner's right to dispose of the mineral, water, and timber resources on his estate. The shortage of capital could be, and in some specific cases was, overcome by direct government grants. But the equally serious shortage of labour was not so easily resolved. Peter permitted the use of servile labour (forced labour) in mines and manufactures, with the result that thousands of peasants were moved and forced to work under unfamiliar conditions, in new places, at very difficult tasks. Resentment ran high and the productivity of this forced labour was very low. Most of the enterprises established in Peter's lifetime did not survive him. But the impetus he had given to Russian industrial development was not altogether lost; it revived with new vigour—under different policies—in the middle of the 18th century.