Peter’s learned advisers, Jacob Bruce and Peter Postnikov, visited educational, medical, and scientific institutions, bought many books, medicaments, and instruments, and hired several hundred specialists including some sixty military surgeons. The embassy led directly to the hiring of Dr Nikolaas Bidloo, a Dutch physician, and Dr Robert Erskine, a Scotsman educated in London and on the continent. Both spent the rest of their lives in Russia, became close friends of Peter, and advised him on matters medical, scientific, and cultural. A Fellow of the Royal Society, Erskine served as the first imperial physician and head of the entire professional medical faculty; in 1707 Bidloo founded the first permanent hospital and surgical school in Moscow, equipped with an anatomical theatre and a large botanical garden. In preparation for further Europeanizing changes, Peter granted a fifteen-year monopoly on book imports to the Dutch printer Jan van Thessing. The bustling cities and harbours, merchant marines and fleets, armies and industries of Europe and England reinforced his determination to pursue change. While in Vienna in July 1698 Peter aborted plans for lengthy visits to Venice and Rome when he learned of the Streltsy mutiny and attempted march on Moscow.
Though quickly suppressed, the Streltsy mutiny afforded an ideal pretext to purge the despised ‘janissaries’ through ghastly tortures and massive public executions. Several victims were displayed outside Sofia’s convent cell. The Streltsy constituted the first sizeable Muscovite institution that the tsar abolished; others such as the boyar duma, the council of the realm, and the gosti (privileged merchants and state fiscal agents) were already in eclipse or simply not summoned by the militarily preoccupied sovereign. He also divorced Evdokiia by incarceration in a monastery. After supervising almost a thousand Streltsy interrogations and executions, three weeks later Peter left for Voronezh. There he laid the specially designed keel of the 58–gun Predestinatsiia, a harbinger of his soaring ambitions while he privately vowed to dissipate his own ‘dark cloud of doubt’.
His southern nautical ambitions inspired two more sojourns at Voronezh in the spring of 1699, interrupted only by Lefort’s funeral in Moscow and the founding in March of the Order of the Apostle Andrew the First-Called, Muscovy’s first knightly order. After launching the Predestinatsiia on 27 April amid great fanfare Peter reached the Sea of Azov with fourteen ships of the line by early June. Later that summer the tsar’s squadron accompanied the 46–gun Krepost’ (Fortress) to the straits of Kerch demanding passage for his envoy to Constantinople.
Peter soon refocused on the Baltic in anticipation of joining Denmark and Saxony to partition the sprawling Swedish Empire under its boy-king, Charles XII. The warrior-tsar’s levy of recruits in November 1699 raised 32,000 men termed ‘immortals’ and destined for lifetime service. The new century was celebrated on 1 January 1700 by official adoption of the Julian calendar and twenty-four-hour day amid cannon-salutes, fireworks, and festive decorations.
Reforms for War
Eager for action in October 1700 Peter, at the death-bed of Patriarch Adrian, called for educated clergy, military, civil servants, architects, and those who knew ‘the doctor’s healing art’. German-speaking advisers such as Heinrich van Huyssen and the Livonian adventurer Johann Reinhold von Patkul were aware of cameralist notions of promoting prosperity through enlightened administration and good order (‘Police’, a term lacking in the Russian vocabulary). Peter’s manifesto of April 1702 inviting foreigners—military officers, craftsmen, and merchants—to enter his service appeared in Patkul’s German translation and adumbrated an emerging reform programme:
It has been Our foremost concern to govern Our lands in a manner that would bring home to Our subjects Our intention to ensure their welfare and increase. To this end We have endeavoured not only to promote trade, strengthen the internal security of the state and preserve it from all manner of dangers which might harm the common good, but also to institute good order [Polizei] and whatever else contributes to the improvement [Cultur] of a people in order that Our subjects may soon become fit to form all manner of associations and exercise various skills along with other Christian and civilized peoples.
With an artisan’s eye and pragmatic mind, Peter envisioned the transformation of Russia into a great power, its state and society based on technology and an organization aimed at maximizing production. Its hallmarks would be a European-type army and navy (supported by heavy industry to produce arms), planned urban conglomerations after the model of St Petersburg, and large-scale public works, particularly canals linking the major waterways and productive centres into an integrated economic whole. Peter even commissioned Perry to oversee a canal connecting the Volga and the Don, an over-ambitious project not realized until the 1930s.
To supply the armed forces with skilled native personnel, Peter began founding makeshift educational institutions. He put Farquharson and two English students in charge of the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (housed in the former quarters of a Streltsy regiment); its enrolments grew from 200 pupils in 1703 to over 500 by 1711. Farquharson assisted Leontii Magnitskii in compiling the encyclopaedic Arifmetika (1703), one of the first Russian books to use Arabic numerals, and fulfilled diverse duties. He copied out other textbooks for his students, wrote, translated, and edited scientific works, and supervised thirty-eight translations by others. He surveyed the Petersburg to Moscow road, charted the Caspian Sea, and went to Voronezh in 1709 to observe the solar eclipse. Transferred with 305 pupils to the St Petersburg Naval Academy in 1715, he rose to brigadier rank in 1737 and left a library of 600 books (half from the Naval Academy) upon his death. An artillery school was set up in Moscow in 1701, its 180 pupils increasing to 300 within three years, but it led a precarious existence until transferred to St Petersburg with 74 pupils in 1719. Private schools and tutoring continued as usual. Allowed back in 1698, the Jesuits had a boarding-school with about thirty boys until the order was expelled again in 1719. A German gymnasium opened under the Lutheran pastor Ernst Glück with state assistance in 1705; with seven teachers and seventy-seven pupils in 1711, it taught Greek and Latin, modern languages (including Swedish), geography, ethics, politics, rhetoric, arithmetic, deportment, and riding. It closed in 1715.
Little did Peter foresee that the apparently easy war against Sweden would burgeon into two decades of incessant campaigning over huge expanses of land and water between shifting coalitions of powers great and small. The Great Northern War (1700–21), so designated in retrospect, consumed the bulk of his life. His role as warrior-tsar was etched into the marrow of the Europeanizing empire and shaped virtually every institution and policy adopted over its tortuous course. The demands of long-term warfare, most notably during the first years, account for the peculiarly frenzied and economically wasteful character of the early Petrine reforms.