Peter's hopes for his new administrative machinery often went unfulfilled. The institutions were alien to Russian practice, the new administrators were insufficiently trained and motivated, and the looming, mercurial presence of the Tsar himself did not contribute to initiative and decisiveness on the part of his subordinates. On the one hand, Peter commanded them to assume responsibility and act boldly; on the other, he punished them if the move they made was the wrong one. Naturally, this made them excessively cautious, "as if a servant, seeing his master drowning, would not save him until he had satisfied himself as to whether it was written down in his contract that he should pull him out of the water."
As Peter grew older, he seemed to grasp this problem. He began to understand the importance of government by laws and institutions rather than by the arbitrary power of individuals, including himself. Instead of being commanded from above, the people were to be taught, guided and persuaded. "It is necessary to explain just what are the interests of the state," he said, "and to make them comprehensible to the people." After 1716, his major decrees usually were prefaced by pedagogical explanations of the need for this legislation, citation of historical parallels, appeals to logic and promises of utility.
On balance, Peter's new governmental system was an improvement. Russia was changing, and the Senate and the colleges administered this new state and society more efficiently than would have been possible under the old boyar council and government prikazi. Both Senate and colleges endured until the end of the dynasty, although the colleges were changed into ministries and the Senate was renamed the Council of the Empire. In 1720, the architect Trezzini set to work on an immensely long red-brick building on the Neva embankment on Vasilevsky Island to house the colleges and the Senate. This building, which now houses Leningard University, is the largest surviving edifice of Peter's St. Petersburg.
Peter's reforms affected individuals as powerfully as institutions. Russian society, like that of medieval Europe, was based on obligations of service. The serf owed service to the landowner, the landowner owed service to the tsar. Far from breaking or even loosening these bonds of service, Peter twisted them tight to extract every last degree of service from every level of society. There were no exceptions and no mitigations. Service was the motive force of Peter's life, and the Tsar thrust his energy and power into making sure that every Russian served as efficiently as possible. Noblemen serving as officers in the new Russian army or navy must know how to fight with modern weapons and tactics; those entering the growing Westernized central administration must have the training and skills necessary to manage their new assignments. The concept of service was broadened to include the duty of becoming educated.
Peter began this program pragmatically with his first impulsive dispatch of young Russians to the West in 1696, on the eve of the Great Embassy. After Poltava, the effort became more serious, more inclusive and more institutionally structured. In 1712, a decree ordered all sons of landowners to report to the Senate. They were divided into age groups; the youngest were sent to Reval to study seamanship, the middle group went to Holland for naval training and the eldest marched directly into the army. In 1714, the dragnet was extended: All young noblemen between ten and thirty not already registered or in service were commanded to report to the Senate for service during the winter.
Peter intended the army to be wholly officered by professionally trained Russian noblemen who had begun their twenty-five years of service at the age of fifteen when they entered the Guards or a line regiment as private soldiers. From that lowest rank, each nobleman was to work his way up on the basis of merit. In February 1714, Peter categorically prohibited the commissioning of any officer, no matter what his title, who had not come up through the ranks. At one point, 300 princes of the noblest families of Russia were serving as private soldiers, receiving the minimum in pay, food and comfort. According to Prince Kurakin, it was not uncommon for Petersburgers to see a Prince Golitsyn or Prince Gagarin with a musket on his shoulder doing sentry duty in front of his barracks.
Instruction for these young men, however, went far beyond how to handle firearms and conduct military drill. As more and more of them passed through these training years, the regiments became not only nurseries for officers but academies for service to the state in a variety of fields. Some young men would learn gunnery, some engineering, some navigation, some languages— one was sent to Astrachan to learn about salt mining. In time, the officers of Peter's Guards became a pool from which Peter could draw for almost any service. The watchdogs whom the Tsar set on his Senate were Guards officers; these same officers made up the majority of the civil tribunal which condemned the Tsarevich Alexis.
Although most of the young noblemen went into the army, this was not the preferred avenue of state service; the civil service was growing rapidly, and its entry doors were always crowded as work in government offices was less dangerous, less arduous and potentially far more lucrative. To narrow the stream of candidates flowing in this direction, Peter decreed that no more than one third of the members of a family could serve in civil government; two thirds must serve in the army or the navy.
The navy, a body wholly alien and repugnant to most Russians, was even more intensely and universally unpopular than the army. When a son had to go into service, the father struggled to enter him anywhere other than in the navy. Nevertheless, in 1715, when the School of Mathematics and Navigation was transferred from Moscow to St. Petersburg, its classrooms were filled. "This summer the Naval Academy was opened," wrote Weber in 1715. "I daresay that there was not one noble family within the boundaries of the vast Russian empire but what was obliged to send thither one or more sons above ten and under eighteen. We saw swarms of these young plants arriving from all parts of Russia at St. Petersburg. So that this academy at present contains the flower of the Russian nobility who for these four years past have been instructed in all the sciences belonging to navigation, besides which they are taught languages, fencing and other bodily exercises."
Russian nobles did not bow easily to Peter's disposition of their sons or themselves. Although Peter's first decree in 1712 was simply an effort to bring the lists of noblemen up to date and register them for future service, the Tsar knew he could not easily uproot these young men from their comfortable lives in the provinces. Accordingly, he accompanied the order with the threat that failure to report would be punished by fines, corporal punishment and confiscation of property. He added that anyone accurately identifying a nobleman who failed to report would receive all of that nobleman's wealth, even if the informer was "a runaway serf."