Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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Foreign policy and the armed forces
Sweden was in much better shape, but also had weaknesses under the sur-
face. The new naval base at Karlskrona made it possible to check the Danish
navy and control at least the northern Baltic, as long as England or Holland did
not intervene. Sweden’s army was the best trained and organised in the area,
for the system of cantoning the army (indelningsverk) on particular districts
preserved it as a fighting force even in peacetime. Sweden’s state organisa-
tion, formed under Gustavus Adolphus and count Axel Oxenstierna, gave the
country an efficiency that was the envy of Europe. The 1680 proclamation of
absolutism by King Charles XI gave, it appeared, the flexibility to the execu-
tion of policy that the need to consult the riksdag (Swedish assembly of estates)
thwarted. The return of royal lands (the reduktion) seemed to ensure revenue
for the absolute king.
This impressive structure was built on sand. Under the Swedish crown
was a population of only about 1.8 million in Sweden and Finland and a
few hundred thousands in the Baltic provinces and other possessions. These
numbers were too small to sustain large armies, and it was always necessary
to recruit outside of Sweden. This meant money, and that was in short supply.
Sweden was simply too poor to provide enough money, particularly in cash.
For most of the seventeenth century the single largest item of cash income
for the crown were the Riga tolls. Nothing in Sweden proper could compare.
Gustavus Adolphus had pursued his wars by confiscating the tolls in Polish
and Ducal Prussia and subsidies from France. The economic situation had not
changed in any major way by the 1690s, and furthermore those years were
ones of poor harvests and famine. Sweden could win a war only by carrying
the fight to other lands, exploiting their wealth and attracting subsidies. The
brilliance of Swedish organisation, civil and military, made such a strategy
possible, but a long war could create immense obstacles.
Russia’s strength lay under the surface and the initial underestimation of
Peter’s chances by allies and enemies alike was entirely understandable. Rus-
sia’s army was in the process of modernisation, and previous experience
demonstrated how difficult that was. The use of mercenaries in the Time
of Troubles and the Smolensk War (1632–4) was a failure. Later on Tsar Alexis
used European officers to train Russian soldiers, infantry and cavalry, in the
new techniques of warfare, fighting in formation and using pikes to supple-
ment musket fire. The change was not complete, however, and Peter had to
start anew in the 1690s. Older elements remained, such as the Russian gentry
cavalry, even operating in considerable numbers through the early years of
the Northern War. The speed of change meant a great lack of trained officers,
whom Peter recruited abroad, but that system had its own difficulties. Unless
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the modernisation was thorough and rapid, the changeover could create even
greater confusion, as the first battle of Narva demonstrated.
No one had a clear idea of Russia’s economic resources, but everyone knew
thedistances werevast and communicationsvery poor. Itdid not have extensive
iron production, artisanal or otherwise, and imported weapons in large num-
bers. Russia had to maintain an expensive permanent army on the southern
frontier against the Crimeans. It had no navy, and thus no experienced officers
and sailors when Peter built one. The tsar and great boyars were wealthy, but
the country as a whole was poor (if not as poor as Sweden) and the adminis-
trative structure inadequate. In the provinces the administrative structure was
especially limited, leaving the provincial governors with tiny staffs to admin-
ister areas the size of several French provinces. The central government in
Moscow was slow and cumbersome, operating according to unwritten tra-
ditional procedures. Russia lacked not only trained officers but men with a
whole series of technical skills necessary to warfare, modern fortification,
shipbuilding, mathematically precise artillery. It had no engineers to drain
swamps or build canals, rendering the communication problem even worse.
Finally, most of the Russian elite lacked the general education on which to base
the acquisition of these skills. In the terminology of the time, Russia lacked
the arts and sciences and was thus ‘barbaric’.
Nevertheless, Russia had some crucial advantages of which even her leaders
maynot have been fully aware.One important advantage was demographic. In
Peter’s time, from the 1670sto1719, the population grew from some 11 million
to about 15.5 million. In the sixteenth century, Russia and Poland-Lithuania
had been similar in population (6 –7 million), probably with an advantage
to Poland. After the middle of the seventeenth century Russia had decisively
pulled ahead of Poland, and compared to Sweden, it was becoming a giant.
This population growth had been rapid after the end of the Time of Troubles,
and was accompanied by a shift in settlement away from the western frontier
and the centre towards the east, the Urals and the south-east, the Volga and
the steppe. This shift also meant that labour was available for the salt wells
and iron mines of the north and the Urals, and that better, richer, land was
coming under cultivation in the south. Thus grain prices remained stable over
a century of population growth. Russia’s foreign trade grew throughout the
century, primarily through Archangel. As the terms of trade were in Russia’s
favour, Dutch and English merchants came to the Dvina with their ships
ballasted with silver that flowed into the Russian treasury directly at Archangel
and indirectly through Russian fairs and market towns. The importance of this
trade lay not in any larger economic transformation – Russia remained firmly
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agrarian – but in the flow of cash which it produced. The tsar, unlike the
King of Sweden, had a ready supply of silver coins, coming in from the sales
tax and the vodka monopoly. The trade also provided the merchants with
modest capital, part of which was invested in iron mines and metalworking
shops that supplied the army. None of the favourable economic factors was
strong enough to allow Russia to fight a war without difficulty, but all were
sufficient to allow protracted conflicts without major crisis. The old Russian
administration had been fairly good at procuring resources, and Peter’s new
methods were even better. He was able to take the war into the territory of
his enemies and neighbours, and at the same time Russia’s very size and poor
communications were immense obstacles to any invader.
Thus Peter was by no means weak when he went to war, though he was
probably no more aware of his advantages at first than other contemporaries.
In his agreements with Augustus, he had demanded little, giving most of the
Baltic provinces to Poland and asking only for a small coastal strip, basically
Russia’s pre-1617 territory. He had built a new army and navy, and was quickly
learning how to mobilise resources,but he had only some experience of success
and admired the alleged political and military skills of Augustus.The question
that to some extent still eludes us is, however, what did he want to accomplish?
The three wars of Peter’s reign, the Azov Campaign, the Northern War
and the Persian Campaign, were all different, but they had one thing in com-
mon, the desire for ports. This desire does not imply that Peter was trying
to found a commercial empire, but it does seem to have been high on his
priorities in all three cases.
The Azov Campaign is the most difficult to explain simply because of the
character of record-keeping in seventeenth-century Russia. The Russian state
kept detailed records of decrees, orders, military and tax rosters, diplomatic
negotiations and judicial proceedings, but not of the discussions leading up to
decisions. Thus we can only infer Peter’s motives. In joining the Holy League,
Sofia had demanded of the Ottomans access to the Black Sea at the Dnieper and
Don and the destruction of the Crimean Khanate. Golitsyn’s military strategy,
a frontal attack on the peninsula, seems to vindicate the seriousness of these
demands. After her overthrow, the Naryshkin government moderated these
demands, requiring not the destruction of the Khanate but only a cessation of
raids, and access to the Black Sea by the two rivers. The Naryshkins, however,
were too indecisive to actually realise their presumed aims. Peter’s military
moves, a main blow at Azov with a secondary campaign on the Dnieper under
Boris Sheremetev and Hetman Mazepa, fitted the Russian demands, which
now gave priority to the river mouths. At the same time Russia’s post-1667
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borders had placed her in direct confrontation with the Ottomans. Not only
were the Crimeans closer but from Kiev it was only a short journey across the
steppe to the Ottoman forts at Bender and Khotin, the gates to the Balkans.
The competition for power and territory was unavoidable, and in addition
the religious factor is not to be discounted. Peter’s propaganda and diplo-
macy stressed Christian solidarity against Islam, and given Peter’s real if rather
unconventional piety, as well as the culture of the age, these were serious
motives. All this being said, we still have to infer Peter’s reasons primarily
from his actions.
The Northern War is another situation entirely, for there are many, if often
imperfect, testimonies to Peter’s motives. During the Great Embassy of 1697–
8 a number of the Europeans who met Peter and his entourage recorded
some discussion about acquiring a Baltic port, and diplomats back in Moscow
picked up the same talk. We have nothing from Peter’s hand that records this
notion, but the envoy of Peter’s newallyAugustusII, Georg Carl von Carlowitz,
reported Peter’s words, that the tsar felt that he was unjustly deprived of a Baltic
port, both for his navy and for commerce, and wanted to revenge himself on
Sweden. The latter remark may have referred to the insult Peter felt he had
received at Riga in 1697 but also pointed to another issue that surfaced in the
war and in Peter’s private correspondence as well as public propaganda. The
lands at the head of the Gulf of Finland, Ingria and the Kexholm province,
had been part of Novgorod and then of Russia since the beginning of recorded
history and were lost only in the Time of Troubles. The population remained
to a large extent Orthodox (though most of it was probably Finnish speaking)
after 1617. Thousands had left for Russian territory, fleeing Lutheran pastors
and Swedish landlords, and new, Lutheran, settlers from the Finnish interior
came to replace them in many areas. Of course the ethnic structure of the
area per se was a matter of indifference in seventeenth-century Europe, but
the whole story served as a reminder of the territory’s Russian past. In the
original treaty with Augustus II these territories were to be Russia’s prize.
The problem with Ingria was that it had no port, so it is not surprising
that once he declared war on Sweden in August 1700, Peter marched not
into Ingria but towards Narva, in Estonia. This move disturbed Augustus II,
since the treaty with Peter gave him all of Livonia and Estonia (including
Narva) in the event of victory over Sweden. There was nothing Augustus could
do, however, and the move did have a certain military logic, for Narva was
more important a fortress than any of the small Swedish positions in Ingria. In
the event Charles XII (with Anglo-Dutch naval help) knocked Denmark out of
the war and turned towards Estonia. Peter’s army suffered its greatest defeat
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beforeNarva on 19/30 November, an event that forced him to change direction,
and in 1702–3 he captured Ingria, from the head of the Neva at N
¨
oteborg
(Oreshek, after 1703 Shlissel’burg) to Estonia, with the island of Retusaari in
the gulf itself. At the mouth of the Neva Peter began to build St Petersburg,
precisely the naval and commercial port he had wanted. Retusaari became
Kronslot (Kronstadt), his main naval base in the Baltic. Peter’s subsequent
behaviour and statements underscored the centrality of the new city in his
plans. During 1706–8 he made a number of overtures to Charles XII for a
compromise peace. Though he had captured Narva and Dorpat in 1704,he
offered to surrender all of his conquests with the exception of St Petersburg and
its immediate vicinity. Charles rejected the offers, but they show what Peter
considered absolutely essential. Nothing that Peter did or said after Poltava
contradicts the priority given to the new port. Peter took Viborg in 1710 to
provide a better defensive perimeter to the new city on the north-west, and the
capture of Reval and Riga served the same aim, as well as expanding Russia’s
naval and commercial possibilities. Peter left Baltic society in the hands of
the local nobility and encouraged the towns to act as ports for the empire
as a whole. Similarly he had no interest in Finland west of Viborg, for the
country was too poor, lacked good ports and significant commerce, and was
not essential for the defence of Petersburg.
The priority given to the port was perhaps the basis of Peter’s commitment
to the war with Sweden, but it was not the only element. He seems to have
really felt that the losses from the Smuta needed to be rectified. In 1716 he
commissioned Shafirov to write a long defence of his policies in the war, which
he personally edited and supplemented,
2
and had it translated into German and
other European languages The thrust of the textwas that he was only rectifying
past injustice, the seizure of Ingria and Karelia in the Time of Troubles and also
Sweden’s failure to uphold Russian claims to Livonia, which it had (he argued)
recognised in the 1564 truce with Ivan the Terrible. The argument was that
Russia, not the dynasty, had claim to all this, and indeed Shafirov even said that
the ‘Russian empire’ (rossiiskaia imperiia) had such claims, thus using the term
five years before Peter adopted the title of Emperor (imperator). In claiming
the territory for Russia, Shafirov and Peter did two things. They abandoned
the older Russian claims to territory based on patrimonial inheritance: Ivan
IV had claimed that Livonia was his personal inherited estate (votchina)asa
2 Rassuzhdenie kakie zakonnye prichiny egotsarskoevelichestvoPetr pervyi tsar’ i povelitel’vserossi-
iskii...knachatiiuvoiny...imel(St Petersburg, 1717); repr. P. P. Shafirov, A Discourse
Concerning the Just Causes of the War between Sweden and Russia: 1700–1721, ed. W. Butler
(Dobbs Ferr, NY: Oceania Publications, 1973).
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Riurikovich, as he and his ancestors had also done in the cases of Smolensk
and Polotsk. The authors also fit their claims into the then usual definitions
of a just war. Samuel Pufendorf, who came to be Peter’s favourite European
historian and political thinker, alleged two sorts of just war, defence against
an attempt against one’s life and property (defensive war) and an attempt to
recover things lost unjustly in previous conflicts (offensive war) [Pufendorf, De
Officio hominis et civis, 1682, bk. II, chapter 16.2]. They also followed Pufendorf
in pointing to Charles XII’s attempt to stir up rebellion in Russia, something
both Pufendorf and Grotius had condemned as inflicting more harm on the
enemy than humanity in warfare allowed [Pufendorf, De Officio, II, 16.12]. The
Russians did not, however, follow Pufendorf in all respects. Pufendorf believed
in the interests of states, and that these interests were the main motives of
their policies, as he described in his history of Europe (translated into Russian
in 1710). Peter and Shafirov also got from Pufendorf their idea of Sweden’s
main motive in the war, to keep Russia ignorant and weak, to prevent it from
learning the arts of war of the West. They do not allege any such state interests
for Russia, however, perhaps only because the need for a port coincided so
neatly with the recovery of unjustly taken territories. It is also the case that
European monarchs still preferred to downplay or just plain conceal their
own state interests while emphasising those of their opponents. Shafirov’s
tract followed this example.
In the 1717 tract and elsewhere Peter and his spokesmen also deviated from
another norm of earlier Russian justifications for war, the defence of Ortho-
doxy. In all the wars with Poland and Sweden, but especially in 1653–4, the
tsars had made much of this issue, and in 1700 Peter had a good case. The
Swedish government did harass and persecute Orthodox peasants, Finnish
and Russian alike, after 1619. Stefan Iavorskii, the curator of the patriarchal
throne after 1701, did mention this issue in some of his early sermons, but it
soon disappeared from Russian official and unofficial pronouncements as well
as from the themes of celebrations and other types of propaganda. In a differ-
ent way, however, Peter retained a religious understanding of his war along
with the secular rationale, for he clearly believed that God was on his side. He
celebrated his triumphs with liturgy as well as fireworks. In 1724 he decided to
correct the liturgy composed by Feofilakt Lopatinskii to celebrate Poltava. He
objected to the monk’s phrase that Russia had fought for the cross of Christ.
The Swedes, he wrote, honour the cross just as we do, ‘Sweden was proud, and
the war was not about faith, but about measure.’
3
Charles XII, in other words,
3 P. Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre Velikom, 2 vols. ( St Petersburg, 1862), vol.
II, p. 201.
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was proud beyond measure, and God punished him. Peter wanted Feofilakt
to quote the Bible, ‘Goliath’s proud words to David, and David’s trusting in
the Lord’: ‘This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand, and I will smite
thee...’(1 Samuel 17: 46).
Many motives made up Peter’s decision to start and continue the war with
Sweden. He felt that his cause was just, even according to the latest European
thinking. He believed that Russia needed a port to maintain its prosperity and
power. He thought Sweden was preventing Russia from acquiring the fruits of
European civilisation. He also understood the prestige conferred by military
victory at home and abroad, and the power that it gave in diplomacy. He
wrote to his son Alexis in 1716 that it was through war that ‘we had come from
darkness out into the light; us, whom no one in the world knew, they now
respect...’
4
Thus Peter’s dogged determination to bring the war to a victorious close
should not be surprising. The success of Charles in deposing Augustus II in
1706 and placing Stanislaw Leszczynski on the Polish throne as a Swedish pup-
pet certainly prompted Peter’s proposals for a compromise peace, but when
Charles rejected them, Peter continued to fight. At Z
´
olkiew in December,
1706, he chose the basic strategy of withdrawal to the Russian frontier that he
pursued for the next two and a half years. Charles was in no hurry, sure as
he was that his approach to the Russian border would result in an aristocratic
as well as popular revolt against the tsar. Charles’s advisers had been telling
him for years that Russia was unstable and Peter unloved, and he printed
proclamations to circulate in Russia calling for revolt. Indeed many in Europe
held the same opinion. As the Swedish king moved east, however, his supplies
ran low, and at Lesnaia (28 September/9 October 1708) Peter cut off the relief
column. At the Russian frontier there was no revolt, so Charles turned south
towards the Ukraine where Hetman Mazepa joined him, but without most of
the Ukrainian Cossack host, whose rank and file remained loyal to the tsar. The
Swedes managed to survive the winter and laid siege to Poltava, where Peter
defeated them (27 June/8 July 1709), his greatest triumph. At Poltava Peter’s
relentless training, good use of artillery and understanding of his limits gave
him victory. Peter built field fortifications and let Charles attack him, realising
that his army lacked the precise training and experience for an attack. The
steadfast courage of his infantry broke the Swedish assault, not the last battle
of this type in Russian history. Even more crushing to Charles’s fortunes was
4 N. G. Ustrialov, Istoriia tsarstvovaniia Petra Velikogo, 5 vols. in 6 (St Petersburg, 1858–63),
vol. VI, p. 347.
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the aftermath, for he escaped across the Dnieper to Turkish territory, leaving
behind all the troops who had escaped from Poltava. His veterans, dispersed
as prisoners through Siberia, could not be replaced in a small country like
Sweden.
The rest of the Northern War was a struggle to finish the job. Charles was as
stubborn as Peter, and even the loss of all the Swedish German possessions and
the Russian conquest of Finland in 1713–14 did not shake his resolve. Instead,
Charles spun fantastic plans to conquer Norway, where he perished in 1718.For
Russia, the years after Poltava meant coalition warfare in northern Germany
and new diplomatic complexities. Denmark was a largely loyal ally until 1720,
but too small to be of much use. Hanover and other German states were glad
to seize Swedish possessions, but Peter’s marriage of his daughter to the Duke
of Mecklenburg in 1716 convinced both the Habsburgs in Vienna and King
George I of Great Britain and Hanover that Peter had great designs in the
Baltic. In fact, the Mecklenburg scheme was part of a desperate attempt to
surround Sweden and put enough pressure on Charles to accept defeat and
make peace. His death brought a new king and queen to the Swedish throne,
who hoped to rely on the British navy to pressure Peter into a peace favourable
to Sweden. Their hope was in vain. The British navy was certainly enormously
more powerful than Peter’s ships of the line with their newly trained crews and
foreign officers, but the Russian galley fleet, borrowed from Mediterranean
practice to sail in the Baltic skerries, inflicted devastating raids on the Swedish
coast with virtual impunity. At Nystad in August, 1721, Peter got all he wanted:
Ingria, Karelia, Viborg, Estonia and Livonia. Russia had a port, with a large
defensive perimeter around it, and was now a European power, dominant in
the north-east.
The final war of Peter’s life was in a totally different direction, and seems to
have been entirely commercial in inspiration. This was the Persian campaigns.
Peter had toyed with the idea of exploiting the internal dissension in Iran for
some time, but only with the conclusion of the Northern War was he free to
move south. This he did immediately, a difficult series of campaigns overland
and by sea, ending in the short-lived Russian occupation of Gilan. Peter’s
correspondence with Artemii Volynskii and other documents make clear that
this was a commercial enterprise. The idea was to seize the silk-producing
areas of northern Iran, which had long provided Russia with silk, both for its
own needs and for resale to Europe.
5
Peter had learned from the Dutch and
5 S. M. Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 15 vols. (Moscow, 1960–6), vol IX, pp.
366–77.
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English that overseas trade backed by military force was the road to wealth
and power, and in a small way was determined to imitate them. Ultimately
Russia had neither the commercial development nor the type of military forces
necessary for such a task, and in 1735 had to return the territories to Iran.
For all Peter’s interest in Iran after 1721, Russia’s international relations
necessarily focused on Europe. Peter had created an entirely new situation
in northern and eastern Europe, and needed a new set of alliances and rela-
tionships. Most dramatic perhaps was the new relationship to Poland. The
return of Peter’s erstwhile ally, Augustus II, to the Polish throne after Poltava
at first seemed like a great boon to Russia, again giving Russia’s former chief
antagonist a friendly monarch. Peter continued his earlier policy of support-
ing Augustus against his magnate opponents in Poland until 1715. As time
passed, however, Augustus grew increasingly fearful of Russia’s new power,
and annoyed that Peter was keeping his conquests in the Baltic provinces. He
put out feelers to the Baltic nobility, and began to look for other allies. Peter
began to move away from the king and towards his Polish opponents, who
proved a constant thorn in the side of the king until his death. Continued royal
weakness and magnate rivalries in Poland, to boot a country heavily ruined by
the Northern War, gradually changed the relationship. By the end of Peter’s life
the Russian ambassador in Warsaw was intriguing with the various magnate
parties and other ambassadors, keeping the king in check, and operating as
if Poland was a Russian protectorate, which in many respects it was until the
partitions put a temporary end to its existence as a state.
Sweden also found itself in a wholly new situation. If its economy was in
better shape than Poland’s, and it gradually recovered from the war, politically
there were many analogies. The death of Charles XII in 1718 led to a new
constitution, with a weak king and powerful estates, primarily the noble estate.
Though the new king had relied on Britain to try to reverse Peter’s victories,
he signally failed and had to agree to Peter’s conditions at the 1721 Treaty of
Nystad. The treaty not only ratified Peter’s conquests, Ingria, Estonia, Livonia,
Karelia and the Viborg district of Finland, it specified that Russia would not
interfere with the new Swedish constitution. Peter was perfectly aware that
Sweden’s ‘Age of Freedom’ meant the freedom of Russian, French and British
ambassadors to bribe the members of the Diet to follow their lead.
For Peter after 1721, the central point of his European policy was to retain
his position in the Baltic, which led him to the Holstein alliance and later the
1724 defensive treaty with Sweden. The Holstein alliance gave him a means
to pressure Denmark to remove the Sound tolls on Russian shipping, but
primarily it gave him a means to influence Swedish politics. At that moment
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the Swedish estates were resisting King Frederick’s attempts to reinforce his
position, and thus supported the idea of an eventual Holstein succession (Karl
Friedrich of Holstein was the son of Charles XII’s sister). The idea seems to have
been that Holstein could provide a base for a recovery of the Swedish position
in Germany. For Peter, such aims in Sweden meant that Sweden would not
be looking to regain his Baltic conquests. Thus Russia assured the leaders of
the Swedish estates that she supported the new constitution and the Holstein
succession, and the result was a defensive alliance that helped secure Russia’s
position in the Baltic. Soon afterwards Peter married his daughter Anna to Karl
Friedrich. For Peter’s lifetime the arrangement brought security, but Russia
was to abandon the commitment to Holstein in 1732, as it no longer was needed
to restrain Sweden. (The only importance of the whole episode was that it led
to the birth of the future Peter III.) In all these manoeuvres around the Baltic
Peter avoided taking sides among the larger European powers. Russia would
chose Austria for an ally only after his death.
Russia’s role in larger European politics was extensive, but should not
be exaggerated. Though dominant in north-eastern Europe, Russia did not
become a truly Europe-wide power until the Seven Year’s War. For the main
European rivalry of the time, that of France with the Habsburgs, Holland
and Britain, Russia was still peripheral. France did not even bother to send a
permanent ambassador until after Nystad, using only low-level commercial
agents before. For the Habsburgs, Russia was obviously crucial because of
the Ottomans, and Peter’s involvement in German affairs brought a sharp
reaction. Russian and Austrian ambassadors had complex relations in War-
saw, sometimes antagonistic, sometimes working together. The Dutch and
English had commercial relations with Russia, and their stake in the stability
of the Baltic and its trade meant that Peter’s advances caused great excitement
and occasional fear. None of this, however, had much to do with the crucial
points of conflict in Flanders, the Rhineland, North America and Asia. Russia
remained a major regional power, part of the northern and Balkan systems
that overlapped with the conflicts farther west at certain points, but was not
part of those conflicts.
∗∗∗
Peter’s dreams and Russia’s new position demanded not only a better army
and navy, it demanded a new diplomatic corps. Most of all this meant per-
manent Russian ambassadors outside of Russia, in Istanbul as well as Russia’s
neighbours and the major powers. Before Peter, the Ambassadorial Office
(Posol’skii prikaz) had been one of the most sophisticated of Russian offices,
maintaining detailed records of embassies and negotiations and a broad service
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