5
PETER'S SOLDIERS
FROM the last decade of the seventeenth century to the third decade of the
eighteenth Russian history is overshadowed by the gigantic figure of Peter I
(1689-1725), styled 'the Great': this at least has been the general verdict of
posterity, as it was of contemporaries. It is commonly agreed also that Peter's
military reforms, together with the construction of a navy fundamentally
affected, if they did not actually motivate, all the other innovations with which
Russia's first emperor was associated: modernization of the institutions of
government at the centre and in the provinces, relocation of the capital to
St. Petersburg, introduction of the poll tax, encouragement of education on
functional lines, and so on.^1 The military reforms were carried out in
piecemeal fashion, particularly in the first half of the reign, with little thought
for their impac.t on society as a whole. This was partly due to the pressing exi-
gencies of the war with Sweden (1700-21), which absorbed so much of Peter's
attention and grievously overstrained the country's resources; it was also a
consequence of the ruler's stormy and impetuous temperament.
The tsar-emperor was a firm believer in the need for government by con-
straint and in the military as a bulwark of royal power. He was less of a
militarist than his principal antagonist, Charles XII of Sweden, in that his
obsession with the ai~ci forces was offset by a basic pragmatism and healthy
common sense, but prolonged exposure to the service milieu did affect his
judgement. 'War is the only delight and passion of this young monarch', the
English ambassador remarked in 1704.^2 Later Peter's interests would broaden,
but even six years after the great victory at Poltava (1709) he could write to one
of his associates, on hearing that his consort Catherine had born him a son and
heir: 'I inform you that this night God has given me a recruit with his father's
name; may He grant that I shall see him bear a musket. '^3 The conspicuously
non-military proclivities of the Tsarevich Alexis, his son by his first marriage,
were largely responsible for the tragic conflict between them that ended in the
young man's flight abroad, trial on a charge of treason, and eventual death in
1 This view owes much to its eloquent statement by the late nineteenth-century liberal historian
V. 0. Klyuchevsky, in his lectures on the Petrine period: Soch., vol. 4, abbreviated English
translation (by L. Archibald) as Peter the Great. Klyuchevsky did not, however, extend to other
periods his recognition of 'defence' as supplying the main dynamic of Russian development. The
Petrine cult, common to pre-and post-revolutionary Russian (and most non-Russian) writing, has
distorted our perception of the period: cf. Cracraft, 'Peter I', 'More Peter'.
(^2) Whitworth, 'Doneseniya', SJRJO xxxix. 14.
(^3) Bychkov, Pis'ma Petra Velikogo, p. 40.