Peter the Great

  There were occasions when enterprises foundered simply because Peter was not present to give instructions. His temper could be so fierce and unpredictable that, in the absence of specific orders, people were unwilling to take initiative and simply did nothing. In Novgorod, for example, a large number of leather saddles and harnesses had been stored for the army. The local authorities knew that they were there, but because no order to distribute them had come down from above, they were left until "eventually, moldy and rotten, they had to be dug up with spades." Similarly, in 1717, many oak trunks brought from central Russia through the canals to Lake Ladoga for use in building the Baltic fleet were left to wash up on the shores and bury themselves in mud, simply because Peter was away in Germany and France and had not left specific instructions for their use.

  To bridge the gap between the innovative Tsar who, despite his consuming interest, was often occupied with other matters, and the uncomprehending, unwilling nation, there were the foreigners. None of Peter's work in developing the national economy would have been possible without the foreign experts and craftsmen who poured into Russia between the time of Peter's return from the West in 1698 and his death in 1725. The Tsar engaged more than a thousand foreigners during his first visit to Amsterdam and London, and thereafter Russian envoys and agents at foreign courts were urgently commissioned to search out and persuade local artisans and technicians to enter Russian service.

  Foreign craftsmen, foreign ideas and foreign machines and materials were at work in every sphere of industrial, commercial and agricultural activity. Vines, brought from France, were planted near Astrachan to produce wine which a Dutch traveler pronounced as "red and pleasant enough." Twenty shepherds, arriving from Silesia, were sent to Kazan to shear the sheep and

  teach the Russians there how to make wool so that it would no longer be necessary to buy English wool to clothe the army. Peter saw better horses in Prussia and Silesia and ordered the Senate to establish stud farms and import stallions and mares. He observed Western peasants reaping grain with a long-handled scythe rather than the short-handled sickle which Russian peasants had always bent to use, and decreed that his people must adopt the scythe. Near Petersburg was a factory which turned Russian flax into a linen as fine in every respect as linen from Holland. The flax was spun in a workhouse where an old Dutch woman was teaching eighty Russian women how to use the spinning wheels, which were little known in Russia. Not far off was a paper mill run by a German specialist. Throughout the land, foreigners were teaching Russians how to build and operate glass factories, brick kilns, powder mills, saltpeter works, ironworks and paper mills. Once in Russia, foreign workers enjoyed numerous special privileges, including free houses and exemption from taxes for ten years. Surrounded by suspicious and xenophobic Russians, they lived under the Tsar's personal protection, and Peter sternly warned his people not to harm or take advantage of them. Even when a foreigner failed, Peter usually treated him with kindness and sent him home with a sum of money.

  Behind this policy was not a frivoulous love of everything foreign. Instead, Peter had a single, firm purpose: to use foreign technicians to help build a modem Russia. Foreigners were invited and privileges granted to them on a single condition which was part of every contract: "that they instruct our Russian people properly and conceal nothing." Occasionally, foreign experts did attempt to conceal trade secrets. In one such case, English tobacco curers, departing from Russia, used violent means to prevent their special technology from falling into Russian hands. Astonishingly, Charles Whitworth, the English ambassador, not only countenanced this violence, but committed it himself:

  The great secret which the Muscovites desire to know is the liquor for preparing and coloring the tobacco. . . . The Russian laborers were dismissed and the same evening I went to the workhouse together with Mr. Parsons, my secretary, and four of my servants. We spent the best part of the night in destroying the several instruments and materials, some of which were so strong that they obliged us to make a great noise in pulling them to pieces. There were cloven barrels about a quarter full of the tobacco liquor which I caused to be let out. ... I likewise broke the great spinning wheel, and above three score reels for rolling; I then destroyed three engines already set up for cutting tobacco and took away the plates and cranes for two more; several engines for pressing the tobacco into form have been pulled to pieces, their screws split, the wooden moles broken, the copper carried away, and about 20 fine sieves cut to pieces. . . . The next day my servants returned and burned all that remained of wood.

  Had Peter discovered the ambassador's role in this violent, nocturnal episode, Whitworth's stay in Russia would certainly have been cut short.

  On another occasion, however, a Russian outwitted a secretive foreigner. Peter had established a ribbon factory near Petersburg, staffing it with young Russian apprentices; the master was a foreigner. At the end of a year, Peter found that one young man, the most skilled of the young Russians, could make any kind of ribbon once the materials were set upon the loom, but that neither he nor his companions could begin unaided because the master always placed the work upon the loom himself and forbade anyone to watch during this operation. Peter instructed the Russian apprentice to discover this secret and promised a reward if he succeeded. Accordingly, the apprentice bored a small hole in the ceiling of the workshop and lay quietly on his stomach, observing the master as he set the looms. Having learned the technique, he informed the Tsar, who had set up a loom in his presence in the palace. When the apprentice succeeded, Peter kissed him, gave him money and made him the new master.

  Having constructed a new capital on the Neva, Peter was determined that it should be more than an administrative hive for his bureaucrats and a parade ground for his Guards regiments; he meant St. Petersburg to be a great port and commercial center. To endow it with importance and build it into a major commercial center, he took steps to divert trade to the Neva from other ports, in particular from the lengthy, circuitous Archangel route. This arbitrary commercial upheaval was achieved only by overriding the pleas and cries of many—Russians and foreigners alike—who had invested heavily in that route. Nevertheless, Peter gradually increased the pressure. The struggle continued until 1722, when he finally forbade the shipping of any goods from Archangel other than those actually produced in that province or along the banks of the Dvina. That year, St. Petersburg finally prevailed over Archangel and became the leading port on Russian soil, although its trade was still not as large as Riga's. By the end of Peter's reign, the volume of Russia's foreign trade exceeded the wildest of Peter's early dreams. Overall seaborne commerce had quadrupled in value. In 1724, 240 Western merchant ships arrived in St. Petersburg, while 303 visited Riga. In 1725, 914 foreign ships called at Russian Baltic ports.

  But Peter failed in another objective: the creation of a Russian merchant marine. He had hoped that Russian goods could be carried to the West in Russian merchant ships, but this effort ran into an old prejudice, long inflicted by Western maritime nations. In the time of Novgorod, when Russian merchants had desired to export their produce in their own ships, the merchants of the Hanseatic League had joined against them to insist that they would buy Russian goods only in Novgorod and then be responsible for shipping them themselves. At a later time, an enterprising merchant of Yaroslavl took a cargo of furs to sell in Amsterdam, but, by concerted arrangement among Dutch buyers, he was unable to sell a single fur and had to carry them back to Archangel. There, they were bought immediately at a good price by the Dutch merchant who owned the vessel which had carried the furs back to Russia.

  Early in his reign, Peter resolved to change this pattern and instructed Apraxin, as Governor of Archangel, to build two small Russian ships which would sail to the West carrying Russian cargoes under the Russian flag. Knowing that their arrival would provoke opposition, he pondered where to send them. Dutch and English merchants would be vigorously opposed, while in France, the Tsar felt, the Russian flag might not be respected
. At last the ships were dispatched to France, but already Peter had retreated: They sailed under the Dutch rather than the Russian flag. One of the ships was confiscated by the French, and its return became the subject of a lengthy argument. In general, Peter never succeeded in this effort, and in shipping—and even in the handling of foreign commerce in Russian ports—Dutch and English merchants retained their virtual monopoly.

  Despite this failure, Peter bore no grudge against foreign captains or seamen. On the contrary, he was delighted when foreign merchant ships arrived in Russian ports, welcoming them grandly and treating the captains as brother mariners. As soon as a foreign ship appeared in the harbor of Kronstadt or St. Petersburg, Peter arrived on board to walk its decks, examine its structure and rigging and look for new developments in its construction. His visits were so common, especially among the Duth captains who came annually to St. Petersburg, that they looked forward to sitting down with the Tsar in their cabins with brandy, wine, cheese and biscuits to answer his questions about their voyages. In return, Peter invited them ashore to attend his court and all its celebrations; it was seldom that they returned sober to their ships. As one observer noted: "It is easy to conceive how much this reception was to the taste of people in that line of life and with how much pleasure they steered their course for St. Petersburg."

  Nothing was allowed to spoil this relationship. In 1719, when new customs regulations were drawn up for the port of St. Petersburg, the first draft presented to Peter for approval declared that ships that carried contraband or concealed dutiable goods should be confiscated. Peter struck out this article, explaining that it was much too early in the life of the port for such drastic action; he had no desire to frighten ship captains and merchants away.

  The Emperor allowed visiting captains to speak to him on terms of familiarity which shocked his Russian favorites. When one Dutch captain said he still preferred Archangel to St. Petersburg and the Tsar asked why, the captain cheekily replied that there were no pancakes in St. Petersburg. "Come to court tomorrow," Peter replied, "and you will have your fill of pancakes."

  When foreign seamen became embroiled in disputes with Russians, Peter hurried to the defense. Once, a Dutch merchant vessel, maneuvering into the crowded harbor of Kronstadt, accidentally rammed a Russian frigate, breaking its accommodation ladder. The Russian captain was furious, although the apologetic Dutch captain offered to pay for the damage. Un-appeased, the Russian sent a guard of Russian soldiers and sailors on board the merchantman and demanded ten times the appropriate sum. Peter was at Kronstadt and, hearing of the commotion, rowed out to the frigate to inspect the damage. Seeing that no harm had been done except to the ladder, which could be repaired in a few hours, he became enraged at his frigate captain. "In three hours," he said, "I will return and I expect to see the ladder of your ship repaired." Three hours later, the Tsar returned to find the ladder repaired but unpainted. "Paint the ladder red," he commanded, "and in the future, let foreigners receive nothing at your hands but marks of politeness and friendship."

  It was typical of Peter's character that in the middle of a war, with a new army, a new navy, a new capital and a new national economy all under construction, he should also begin to dig a new system of canals at different points in Russia. It was not that they were unneeded. The distances in Russia were so vast and the roads so poor that commercial goods as well as individual travelers faced almost insurmountable obstacles in moving from place to place. This problem had always bedeviled the effort to bring products from deep inside the giant nation to the seaports for export; now, it presented itself even more acutely in the form of transporting the quantities of grain and other foodstuffs which were needed to feed St. Petersburg. The solution had been provided in large part by nature, which had equipped Russia with a magnificent network of rivers—the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga and the Dvina. Although all these rivers except the Dvina flowed south, it still remained possible to haul goods northward, upstream, by the sheer brute force of human and animal labor. What remained was to connect this far-flung tracery of natural water routes with a system of canals which linked the rivers at vital points.

  Peter's first herculean effort was to try to link the Volga with the Don and thus, by his possession of Azov at the mouth of the Don, give most of the Russian heartland access to the Black Sea. For more than ten years, thousands of men labored to dig a canal and build stone locks, but the project was abandoned when Peter was forced to return Azov to the Turks. The growth of St. Petersburg inspired a second vision: linking the whole of Russia to the Baltic by connecting the Volga to the Neva. By extensive surveying, Peter located in the region of Tver and Novgorod a tributary of the Volga which ran within less than a mile of another stream which flowed, through many lakes and rivers, into Lake Ladoga, which emptied into the Neva. The key was a small canal at Vyshny-Volochok. It took 20,000 men four years to dig the canal with the necessary locks, but when it was finished, the Caspian Sea was linked by water with St. Petersburg, the Baltic and the Atlantic Ocean. Thereafter, a stream of flat-bottomed barges loaded with grain, oak timbers and other products of southern and central Russia, along with the goods of Persia and the East, moved slowly but continuously across the face of Russia.

  Naturally, there were difficulties and opposition. Prince Boris Golitsyn, assigned to oversee the first of these projects, grumbled that "God made the rivers go one way and it was presumption in man to think to turn them another." The flow of river traffic was sometimes impeded when the stone locks of Vyshny-Volochok canal silted up and had to be redredged. But this was a minor obstacle compared to the hazards faced on Lake Ladoga. The surface of this mighty inland lake, the largest in Europe, was sometimes whipped by wind into a violence worthy of an ocean, and often the waves overwhelmed the unwieldy, flat-bottomed river barges which had to have an exceptionally shallow draft to pass through the Vyshny-Volochok canal. When storm winds howling down from the north caught these clumsy river craft on the open lake, the boats either capsized or were driven onto the southern shore of the lake and broken in pieces. Every year, gale winds sank or drove ashore hundreds of barges, with the loss of their cargoes. Peter ordered the construction of a special fleet of lake boats with hulls and keels deeper than the shallow barges, to be used for the passage across Lake Ladoga. But this required unloading and reloading which were far too expensive and time-consuming with cargoes such as grain, hay and timber. His next move was to look for a way of avoiding the lake passage. In 1718, he decided to cut a canal through the swampy land along the southern shore of the lake from the River Volkhov to the mouth of the Neva at Schlusselburg. The total distance would be sixty-six miles.

  The project was first entrusted to Menshikov, who knew nothing of engineering, but was anxious to accept any assignment which might win him favor with Peter. Menshikov spent more than two million roubles and squandered the lives of 7,000 workmen, who died of hunger and disease because of bad administration. A great deal of needless work was done even before the basic decision had been made whether it was better to dig the canal in the earth behind the shoreline or to try to wall off part of the lake with dikes. The Tsar was on the point of abandoning the work when he encountered a German engineer, Burkhard Christopher von Munnich, who had extensive experience building dikes and canals in North Germany and Denmark. Once Munnich took over, the work proceeded more efficiently, and in 1720 Weber wrote: "I am credibly informed that this work is in such an advanced state as to be ready next summer and that consequently the trade between the Baltic and the Caspian Sea, or between all Russia and Persia will be upon a sure foot, though still with the inconvenience that ships coming from Kazan might be near two years on their way." Weber was badly misinformed, and by 1725, when Peter died, the Emperor had seen only twenty miles of the great canal (it was seventy feet wide and sixteen feet deep) actually dug. After Peter's death, Menshikov frowned on the engineer, and it was not until 1732, in the reign of Empress Anne, that the canal was finished and Munnich triumphant
ly escorted the Empress in a procession of state barges along the entire length of the prodigious waterway.

  Today, the great canal system of Russia initiated by Peter forms a giant artery of commerce for the Soviet Union. The canals permit large ships to pass to and fro, up and down the rivers of Russia from the Black Sea and the Caspian to the White Sea and the Baltic. During the White Nights in Leningrad, one can sit on the Neva embankment and, after midnight, when the city's bridges have gone up, watch a long procession of ocean-sized cargo ships pass like silent mammoths up the river, bound for the interior of Russia a thousand miles away.

  Everything had to be paid for. Relentlessly and remorselessly, the war and the great construction projects sucked up the lifeblood and treasure of Russia. Although Peter repeatedly emphasized to his officials that taxes should be levied "without unduly burdening the people," his own constant demand for funds overruled this sentiment. Taxes crushed every article and activity of daily life, yet the state never collected enough money to pay its mounting expenses. In 1701, the army and navy swallowed up three quarters of the revenues; in 1710, four fifths; and in 1724, even though the war was over, two thirds. When money was short, Peter slashed the salaries of all officials, temporal and spiritual, excepting only those most necessary to the realm: "foreign artisans, soldiers and sailors." In 1723, there was so little cash that some government officials were paid in furs.

  The only solution, until growing commercial and industrial activity could expand the tax base, was to lay still heavier taxes on the burdened nation. Hitherto, the basic tax had been the old household tax, determined by a census taken in 1678 during the reign of Tsar Fedor. This tax was laid on every village and landowner according to the number of houses and farms possessed (and made for crowded living because, to avoid taxation, as many families and people as possible crowded under one roof). In 1710, believing that the population must have increased, Peter ordered a new census. To his astonishment, the new census showed that in thirty years the number of households had decreased by from one fifth to one quarter. There was some real justification for this: Peter had drained off hundreds of thousands of men into the army, the shipyards at Voronezh, the work on the canals and the building of St. Petersburg, while thousands more had fled into the forest or to the frontier. But the new low figures also represented the helplessness of the government to overcome the stratagems of both nobility and peasants who were determined to evade taxes. Bribing the commissioners who counted the houses was a preliminary gambit. If this failed, the peasants simply removed their houses from the commissioners' sight. Russian peasant houses were largely made of logs or timbers notched at four corners. Thus, they could be un-notched in a few hours and either removed to the forest or scattered about. The census takers and tax collectors knew the trick, but there was little they could do about it.