to improve social welfare, state power, and social discipline. Such rulers pursued
cameralist and mercantilist policies to improve the life of their people, promoting
population growth, economic dynamism, and expansion.
Instrumentally, in Prussia, the vision was carried out by co-opting the nobility,
empowering the bureaucracy, and reforming with law—decrees and ordinances
regulated social life, public health and education, taxation, trade, and military
organization. In Russia, thePolizeistaatvision was implicitly radical in that it
implicitly embraced change and progress, in contrast to Muscovite ideology’s
focus on tradition and stability. In addition, it depended upon the cooperation of
“intermediary bodies”in society—corporate groups such as nobility, bureaucracy,
professionals, bourgeoisie, clerics, municipal leadership, guilds, and the like. Russia,
by and large lacking such corporate groups, struggled to effect such social mobil-
ization. In the realm of ideology, however,Polizeistaatsecular theory complement-
ed Orthodox traditions that political power was sanctioned by God and constituted
a perhaps more instrumentalized version of late seventeenth-century Enlighten-
ment pursuit of reason and social harmony through political power.
Central among Peter I’s ideologues were Ukrainian-educated clerics, most
notably, Feofan Prokopovich and Stefan Javorskij, who, as Zhivov argued, adapted
these trends of European Enlightenment thinking to Orthodoxy’s focus on the
sacred origins of political power. Others, such as Petr Shafirev and European
military advisors, contributed more decidedly secular writings and ideas. The result
was an explosion of political themes and display to promote an energized vision of
ruler, state, and empire. A panoply of genres—written and material—promoted
this program: learned manifestos, probably primarily intended for the European
audience; lawcodes and decrees annotated with narrative commentary to explain
their purpose; sermons and panegyrics; the built environment; dress, festival, ritual;
parodies of religious symbolism and belief. Petrine ideologists combined religious
and secular justifications of power: Feofan Prokopovich, for example, in defending
the new law of succession by appointment (“The Justice of the Monarch’s Will,”
1722), drew on Orthodox theology (political power is appointed by God), natural
law, and Grotius’conservative reading of social contract. Petrine decrees explicitly
broke with Muscovy’s vision of society as a godly community and political power as
intended to preserve tradition and achieve Edenic harmony; rather, they pro-
claimed the ruler’s complete, secular power. The Military Articles of 1716 declared:
“His Majesty is an autocratic monarch who is not obliged to answer for his acts to
anyone in the world; but he holds the might and the power to administer his states
and lands as a Christian monarch, in accordance with his wishes and best opin-
ions.”Prokopovich’s manifesto on imperial succession confidently asserted,“For
the monarch’s statutes and laws are perfectly confirmed by the Power Above and
require no aid from the reasoning of the teachers.”
Peter I’s ideologues promoted a more activist model of the ruler. They declared
that the ruler was valued primarily for his achievements, and the political elite was
to be celebrated for merit and achievement, not genealogy. Richard Wortman
argues that they even transformed the basis of sovereign legitimacy—only a ruler
who transforms his realm constantly is legitimate. Ubiquitous models of Petrine
270 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801