Army and navy

The Russia Peter inherited could put men into a campaign. It could not keep a European-style army standing through winter, or float a navy that belonged to the state rather than to a single season’s luck. Streltsy musketeers guarded Moscow and, more than once, turned their weapons on the court that paid them. Provincial gentry rode out with their followers when summoned, then went home to their estates. Cossack hosts and frontier garrisons did work no decree from the Kremlin could do alone. Peter wanted a different instrument: regular regiments and ships that existed whether or not a particular fortress was under siege. Mathematics, fortification and navigation were the sciences that appealed to him, and they were the sciences a standing force required. The seed of that instrument was already beside him in the village of Preobrazhenskoye. There he had formed play troops for noisy war games; in 1687 those companies became the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards, which grew into the nucleus of a new Russian army.

The older forces were not a fiction. They could fight, raid and hold a wall. They were not a machine that stayed embodied through drill, pay and a war measured in decades rather than in summers.

He set about replacing the unreliable streltsy and the militia of the gentry with a regular army on lines then called modern for Russia. Officers were drawn from the nobility. Peasants and townspeople filled the other ranks by conscription. Service was for life. By 1710 that levy had produced a standing army recruited from the peasantry and petty townsfolk; by 1724 its effectives numbered some 131,400 infantry and 38,400 cavalry, trained and equipped at a cost the countryside paid in men and tax. The navy took recruits from the same pool. A village lost a young man to a regiment or a ship and did not get him back at harvest. Desertion followed the levy as surely as mud followed rain, and still the sets of men continued, because a war on the Baltic could not be fought with neighbours called up for a summer and dismissed when the roads froze.

A standing army is a social order as much as a tactical one. Noble families were expected to furnish officers; taxpaying households were expected to furnish bodies. The bargain was unequal and it was meant to be. A rekrut might serve until he died; an officer might hope for rank, land and the tsar’s notice. Between them stood the sergeants, the clerks who counted heads, and the foreigners who were paid to make the whole thing look like an army rather than a levy in coats. Lifetime service made desertion rational and punishment necessary. It also made the regiment a place a man might live his entire adult life, far from the village that had given him up.

Western drill came with the new uniforms and with men hired to teach them. Foreign officers, gunners and shipwrights were invited because Russia could not yet grow those skills at the speed a Baltic war demanded. The troops learned to march, fire and camp as western armies did, and written regulations tried to make the habit permanent as the fighting taught him what paper should say. None of this turned a Russian soldier into a Dutchman. It made him usable in a war that punished improvisation, and it made the Guards a school whose lessons the line was meant to copy.

Ilya Repin’s Seeing Off a Recruit was painted in 1879. It can show the inequality of a levy — the village, the women, the man taken — without recovering the fear or the bargaining of any one recruitment day under Peter. Treat it as a later imagining, not as a poster pasted on a barn in his reign.

The Guards remained a new core rather than a costume change. Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky men stood closer to the tsar than ordinary line regiments, and they carried the prestige of having grown from his own games into professional units. A Guards regiment could set a standard of drill that the rest of the army was meant to imitate. It could also remind older musketeer traditions that the sovereign now had a different household of arms. Peter’s negative attitude towards the streltsy had been fixed in childhood, when their revolts had put his life at risk; after later rebellions they were broken as a political force. Their unreliability is part of why he wanted a different army at all. The Guards were that difference made visible: permanent, drilled, and tied to his person rather than to a quarter of Moscow.

The first fleet experience was southern, not Baltic. After the failure of 1695 against Azov, Peter had ships built at Voronezh to go down the Don. In 1696 Azov was taken, Taganrog was founded on the northern shore of the estuary, and work began on a larger navy. He had already sailed the first seaworthy ships to be built in Russia; the Voronezh yards turned that pastime into a tool of state. The sieges themselves belong to the story of his youth and the struggle for power; what matters here is the lesson. A fortress on a river mouth needed vessels. Carpenters, iron and timber had to be assembled far from any oceanic tradition. The Black Sea fleet later had to be given up when the southern war turned against him. The school remained. Russia had learned, expensively, that a tsar who wanted a sea needed yards, sailors and a habit of command afloat, not a single captured wall.

The hero picture is a Dutch record of that appetite, not a recruiting poster. In 1697 Peter travelled with the Grand Embassy and studied shipbuilding in the Dutch Republic, seeking firsthand acquaintance with yards and industrial technique. Painters in Amsterdam showed him on the water among yachts and shipping, a visiting sovereign learning a craft his own country had barely begun. The canvas is a travel image: ceremony, a foreign harbour, a tsar afloat. It tells us what he went to see. It does not show a Russian village yielding a conscript, and it should not be read as if it did.

The Baltic demanded a different fleet, because the long war against Sweden made a northern sea outlet a matter of survival rather than of display. On Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland he established the fortress of Kronshlot, later Kronstadt, to protect the approaches to the Neva. Opposite a new fortress on the river, an Admiralty dockyard began to launch warships; its first was in the water by 1706. Mention of that dockyard is not the founding of a capital. It is infrastructure: slips, timber, guns and a guarded roadstead. Galleys and sailing ships needed a base that Swedish squadrons could not simply close. Kronstadt became the place where the Baltic fleet wintered, repaired and learned to exist as a standing force rather than a summer experiment on a southern river.

Keeping ships was a second construction project that never ended. Hulls rot, rope wears, and guns need powder that itself needs works and wagons. A fleet that looked impressive in a summer review could be useless by autumn if the yards slept. Kronstadt and the Admiralty existed to stop that sleep. Timber, iron, tar and men had to arrive on a calendar the gulf’s ice respected more than any minister did. The expense was not an accident of war. It was the price of refusing to let the navy become a memory between campaigns.

Sailors were as hard to make as hulls. Peasants who had never seen a gulf were trained beside foreigners who had. Dutch and other specialists entered Russian naval service as officers, shipwrights and pilots, while Russians learned on the job, in brutal weather, on vessels that mixed galley oars with sailing rigs because the Finnish skerries rewarded boats that could move in a calm. A landsman taught to handle an oar in a northern autumn was as much a manufactured part as a cannon from a new foundry. The navy was a school with a death rate. It was also a labour market the treasury had to keep filling from the same peasant and town levies that fed the army.

Maurice Baquoy’s etching of Gangut, made in the 1720s after Pierre-Denis Martin, is already a commemorative print. It can suggest smoke, galleys and a crowded shore. It cannot stand in for a log of 1714. Read it as memory dressed for a gallery, not as a witness sketch made from a poop deck.

In 1714, off the Hangö peninsula — Gangut in the Russian telling — a Russian galley force won the first major Russian victory at sea. Peter took part. The details of wind, portage and Swedish dispositions belong to naval historians; the meaning for this chapter is simpler. A state that had launched its first serious ships on the Don now had a Baltic fleet able to beat a Swedish detachment and carry the war towards the Swedish coast. Gangut did not end the conflict. It showed that the expensive machine floated, and that sailors raised by levy could, under oars and in a calm, do work that sailing battle fleets had been expected to monopolise. A first victory at sea is not a tradition. It is proof that the tradition might begin.

Ships and regiments are machines: they consume men and money before they win anything at all.

The consumption is the point that later victories, on land and water, tend to hide. Uniforms, powder, ironworks, timber, biscuit, hospitals and pay all had to be created while fighting was already underway. Russia had virtually no warships when that northern war began; armaments and hulls required foundries, privileges for manufacturers, and labour bound to workshops. Peasants carried the fiscal burden and the human one. They supplied recruits for army and navy, and labour for fortresses, canals and ships. Nobles owed service as officers. Foreign expertise was bought because it could not be grown overnight. Desertion and death thinned the ranks; new levies filled them. None of this requires us to treat Peter as a magician or as a monster in a fable. It requires us to see the army and navy as industrial and social facts, built in a hurry, paid for by people who would never stand on a quarterdeck. Without that standing force the later successes of the reign would have been wishes.

What he left was not a perfect European military copied from a handbook. It was a regular army and a Baltic fleet that outlived him, expensive, harsh and real. The Guards still traced themselves to play companies beside Moscow. The sailors still traced themselves to yards at Voronezh and on the Gulf of Finland. The рекрут remained the man who made both possible, and the countryside remained the account from which he was drawn. Later painters would make the ships look inevitable. They were not. They were paid for, year after year, in peasant sons and furnace smoke.