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Peter the Great and the Northern War

paul bushkovitch

From the end of the fifteenth century to Peter’s time the main preoccupation of Russian foreign policy was the competition with Poland-Lithuania for territory and power on the East European plain. Poland was the hegemonic East European power for almost two centuries, and after initial success by 1514, Russia struggled in vain against its neighbour with few intervals of peace or goodwill. The long series of wars that resulted culminated in the war of 1653–67, which brought the Ukrainian Hetmanate into the Russian state and marked a decisive turn in Russia’s favour. Relations with the Tatar khanates to the south and east were more complex. Russia had conquered Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552–6 but was unwilling to confront Crimea, whose overlord was the Ottoman Empire, western Eurasia’s greatest power until the very end of the seventeenth century. The tsars preferred to build elaborate defences in the south, a line of forts and obstructions that stretched hundreds of miles from the Polish border to the Volga, and mobilise the army every spring rather than risk war with the Ottomans by pressing too hard on Crimea. The only area of relative security was the north-west, the Swedish border. The expansion of Sweden into Estonia in the 1570s and the capture of Ingria, ratified at Stolbovo in 1619, cut Russia off from the Baltic and placed an ever more powerful neighbour on Russia’s frontier, but Sweden’s main preoccupations were with Denmark, Germany and Poland, not Russia. In the seventeenth century Russia’s relations with Sweden were good (apart from the war of 1656–8, a result of the Polish tangle) and the King of Sweden was the only European monarch to be allowed to send a resident emissary to Moscow, from 1630 until the outbreak of the Northern War. Thus it was not without reason that Peter’s declaration of war on Sweden in 1700, in concert with Denmark and King Augustus II of Poland, came as a surprise in Stockholm.1

1 For more detailed discussion and a full bibliography see Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: the Struggle for Power 1 67 1 –1 7 25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Reinhard Wittram, Peter der Grosse. Czar und Kaiser (Gottingen:¨ Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1964).

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Peter’s new war was also a surprise because Russian foreign policy after 1667 had been preoccupied with the Ottoman Empire and its Crimean vassal. Russia’s strategic situation had been radically altered by the acquisition of the Ukrainian Hetmanate, placing Russian troops in Kiev and other Ukrainian towns on the northern edge of the steppe, that is, of Crimean territory. The immediate result was the Chigirin War of 1677–81, the first in which Russian troops actually confronted Ottoman soldiers as well as the Crimeans. The outcome was a minor military defeat for Russia but also recognition of Russia’s new border along the Dnieper. With their northern frontier secure, the Turks under Kara Mustafa pasha turned to Vienna but were defeated in 1683. The failed Turkish siege of Vienna led to the Habsburg reconquest of Hungary and the formation of the Holy League, consisting of the Empire, Poland, Venice and the Papacy. The regent Sophia, Russia’s ruler in Peter’s youth (1682–9) responded positively to an imperial invitation to join the Holy League, but such a step required a full reconciliation with Poland (1686), something that aroused doubts not only among Polish magnates but also in Moscow. The Naryshkin faction was against it, but Sofia and her favourite Prince V. V. Golitsyn persuaded the duma (council of Boyars) to go along and Russia joined in. Her contribution was to be the two Crimean campaigns of 1687 and 1689, both attempts to strike Crimea across the steppe, moving south from the Ukraine, and both ignominious failures. The failures led to the triumph of Peter and the Naryshkins, but the new government was not decisive enough either to break with the alliance or to continue the struggle. The war stagnated until the death of Peter’s mother in 1694 put him wholly in charge for the first time. Late in that year, on his return from Archangel and his first sea voyage, Peter decided to move against the Turks and he did not consult the boyars about it. He followed the enthusiastic advice of his two foreign favourites, Franc¸ois Lefort of Geneva and the Scottish general Patrick Gordon, not that of his Naryshkin relatives. In the war Peter moved not against Crimea but against the Ottoman fort of Azak (Azov) at the mouth of the Don. The lack of a Russian navy caused the failure of the first siege, so over the following winter Peter built one at Voronezh and in 1696 took the fort. It seems that he intended to go on fighting the Turks, opening his way into the Black Sea, and talks with his allies were the diplomatic purpose of the famous trip to Europe in 1697–8. There he discovered that the Habsburgs in particular were weary of war and that Peter would himself have to make peace with Istanbul.

On the way home he met with Augustus II in Poland, who had a new idea: attack Sweden. If Peter went along it meant a break with the tsar’s previous

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favourites, Lefort and Gordon, who continued to favour an anti-Ottoman policy, but both died early in 1699. He mourned their deaths, but for political support found two new favourites, Fedor Golovin, the scion of an old boyar family, and Aleksandr Menshikov, the son of one of the palace falconers. Peter moved quickly to make a treaty with Denmark, completing the circle of allies against Sweden. His method was characteristic, for he ordered the Danish envoy to Voronezh where he was inspecting the shipyards. There he met the Dane at night in a small house on the edge of town with only Fedor Golovin and a translator present, and together they wrote the treaty. Peter told the Dane to be sure to keep the matter secret from the Russian boyars. Complications with the Turkish peace put off the Swedish war until the autumn of 1700, but the new direction was now set.

The course of the war was full of surprises, for the political, military, economic and even demographic position of the warring powers was not what it seemed on the surface. Sweden had been the hegemonic power in northern Europe since the great victories of Gustavus Adolphus, having reduced Denmark in size and power and established itself not only in the Baltic provinces but in northern Germany. The performance of King Jan Sobieski’s army before Vienna in 1683 seemed to suggest that Poland had recovered from its losses in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Contemporaries attributed great significance to Augustus II’s success in Hungary as an imperial ally and commander, presuming that he, like Sobieski, could overcome the contentions of Polish magnates long enough to secure victory. Russia, in contrast, was still a marginal power, fighting with mixed success against the Turks and Tatars and apparently much less important than Poland.

In reality, the situation was quite different. Poland’s problems extended beyond magnate quarrels with the king and with one another. The Cossack rebellion of 1648 and the subsequent wars had largely been fought on Polish territory, leading to economic catastrophe and demographic collapse. It did not regain its pre-1648 population (about 11 million) until the middle of the eighteenth century. Further, its crucial grain exports met increasing competition from improved farming techniques in Holland and England, its main markets. Polish cities stagnated after 1648, falling in population and prosperity. The most ruthless government would have raised revenue with difficulty in this situation, but revenue for the army was almost entirely at the will of the diet (Polish parliament) and the szlachta (nobility) served in the army as volunteer cavalry or on the wages of great magnates. A modern infantry army was an impossibility. The king also could not fully control Poland’s Baltic ports (Danzig and Elbing) nor could he build a navy.

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Sweden was in much better shape, but also had weaknesses under the surface. 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 organisation, 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 execution 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. Russia’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 supplement 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 the distances were vast and communications very poor. It did not have extensive iron production, artisanal or otherwise, and imported weapons in large numbers. 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 administrative structure inadequate. In the provinces the administrative structure was especially limited, leaving the provincial governors with tiny staffs to administer areas the size of several French provinces. The central government in Moscow was slow and cumbersome, operating according to unwritten traditional 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 may not have been fully aware. One important advantage was demographic. In Peter’s time, from the 1670s to 1719, 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 common, 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 diplomacy 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 new ally Augustus II, 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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before Narva 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 Noteborg¨ (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 text was 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) as a

2Rassuzhdenie kakie zakonnye prichiny ego tsarskoe velichestvo Petr pervyi tsar’ i povelitel’ vserossiiskii . . . k nachatiiu voiny . . . imel (St Petersburg, 1717); repr. P. P. Shafirov, A Discourse Concerning the Just Causes of the War between Sweden and Russia: 1 7 00–1 7 21 , 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 Orthodoxy. 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 different 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,

3P. 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 puppet certainly prompted Peter’s proposals for a compromise peace, but when Charles rejected them, Peter continued to fight. At Zolkiew´ 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

4N. 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

5S. 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 relationships. 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 supporting 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 Warsaw, 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 permanent 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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of news collecting. European newsletters were obtained in large numbers and translated into Russian to be read in the boyar duma on a regular basis. Russian culture changed rapidly after about 1650, with knowledge of Polish and Latin spreading among the elite and much geographic knowledge in translation as well. None of this, however, could substitute for diplomats on the spot, and in the 1667 treaty with Poland there had been provisions for the exchange of permanent residents. In Moscow by the 1690s the Polish ambassador was part of a group that included emissaries from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and the Holy Roman Emperor, but Russia sent out permanent ambassadors only from 1699. The first two were Andrei Matveev (1699) to the Netherlands (and north-west Europe in general) and Prince Petr Golitsyn to Vienna (1701). These were men with knowledge of (at least) Latin, and some reading on European states, and they also brought their wives and servants. Bringing families was not easy (Princess Golitsyna was very unhappy with high-heeled shoes and stockings), but it meant that Russian diplomats could begin to mix in elite society with greater ease. The new diplomats were men of considerable learning, as Matveev’s writings and library demonstrate. He wrote his communications to the Dutch government at first in Latin, but later seems to have learned French. Prince Boris Kurakin, his successor in the Hague and later ambassador to other countries, spoke Italian best of all, a language he learned in Venice. Peter sent him there in 1697 to learn languages and navigation, and he seems to have passed his navigation tests, but learned his Italian also from the famous Venetian courtesans. He found in Venice a justification and ideology of aristocratic government, which he developed in private notes and writings on Russian history and European states, all the time serving the absolute tsar.

Most of the Russian ambassadors were indeed great aristocrats (Matveev the exception here). Kurakin, the Golitsyns, several Dolgorukiis, were all princes and men who could hold their own in contests of honour and pride, as well as political acumen, with their European counterparts. Peter also found foreigners to serve him in this capacity, the unfortunate Patkul but also James Bruce, Heinrich Ostermann, and lesser lights like Johann Baron von Urbich and Johann Baron von Schleinitz. At the centre of this network in Russia was Gavriil Ivanovich Golovkin (1660–1734), who took over foreign policy after the death of Fedor Golovin in 1706. Golovkin came from a noble but not aristocratic family, but he had been part of Peter’s household since 1676. He stayed in Moscow in 1697, where Peter wrote to him regularly. His second in command was Petr Pavlovich Shafirov (1669–1739), the son of a converted Jew brought to Moscow in the 1650s. Shafirov was a professional, a translator

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in the Ambassadorial Office since 1691, serving in that capacity on the Great Embassy. Later he was Fedor Golovin’s personal secretary. Golovkin found him indispensable for his knowledge of languages and European politics, though nobody seems to have liked him. He was ambassador to Istanbul in the crucial years after the Prut campaign, and Russia’s extrication from that mess owed much to his skill. In court politics Golovkin retained a strict neutrality, as did Shafirov at first. After 1714 he was moving closer to the aristocrats, perhaps out of enmity with Menshikov. Both Golovkin and Shafirov were part of court politics, but they were both lightweights, and both isolated and neutral for most of their careers, Golovkin entirely so and Shafirov until nearly the end of Peter’s life. It was their administrative and other talents that kept them where they were, not aristocratic origins or court alliances. They were, however, what Peter needed, knowledgeable executors of his will, good organisers of diplomacy, not policy-makers.

Peter was the policy-maker. In the early years of the reign, Gordon and Lefort seem to have exerted their influence to encourage Peter to return to war with the Ottomans, and after their death the rise of Golovin and Menshikov similarly reflected the new foreign policy. Golovin died in 1706, and by the time of Poltava Peter seems to have made his foreign policy with much consultation with his favourites, but less with the aristocracy. Menshikov certainly had opinions, and as Peter’s commander in Germany in 1713 made decisions on his own that Peter did not like, but they were not major changes of direction, and Peter reversed them. Later on there is no information to suggest that Prince V. V. Dolgorukii in his time of favour (1709–18) or Iaguzhinskii, a favourite from about 1710 onwards had any consistent vision of foreign policy or influence over it. The basic factional breakdown at court after 1709 was about the position of the aristocracy, pitting the Dolgorukiis and their allies against Menshikov and his. Legends aside, Peter was not a monarch who refused to consult his ministers and generals, like Charles XII. On campaign he regularly held councils of war and seems to have generally gone with the majority, even when he had doubts, as in the decision not to invade Sweden from Denmark in 1716. Yet his foreign policy was his own, made with the technical assistance of Golovkin, Shafirov, the diplomats and the generals, but not with the great men of the court.

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