The cost of modernization

Every reform in this chapter had a cost, and the cost was not evenly shared. Colleges, ranks and a new calendar can be told as modernisation. They were also a levy on people who could not refuse: peasants counted as souls for tax, serfs bound more tightly to land and factory, labour drafts for a new city and for canals, soldiers taken for life. Power itself had been secured in blood. In 1698, after a streltsy revolt, hundreds of musketeers were executed. In 1718 the tsarevich Alexis, Peter’s son and heir, died in prison after proceedings for treason. In 1725 Peter died without naming the successor he had reserved the right to choose. Transformation and violence belong in the same paragraph. To separate them is to misunderstand the reign.

The bill was collected in ordinary years, not only in crises. A village felt the programme as recruits, carts, money and missing sons long before a gazette announced a victory. Tax farmers, clerks and officers arrived with lists; they left with men, grain and the promise of another visit. Peace, when it came, did not cancel the habit of taking. The new capital still needed labour. The fleet still needed hemp and timber. The army still needed replacements for the dead and the deserted. What looked from Petersburg like a modern fiscal order looked from a hut like a season that never quite ended, only changed the name of the levy.

War was the atmosphere in which the fiscal machine was rebuilt, and the treasury’s hunger did not wait for peace. A string of extraordinary levies, duties and petty taxes — on goods, services, even on beards for those who kept them — still left the state short. After 1718 a poll tax on male souls began to replace the older assessment by household; a census in 1722 prepared the substitution of this soul tax for the previous hearth tax, and by 1724 the new levy was in working order. Adult males were counted whether they lived in plenty or in want. The unit of the state became a soul that could be listed, assigned to a regiment’s upkeep, and made to pay. A surplus in the treasury by 1724 did not mean ease in a hut. It meant the counting had become efficient enough to close a deficit. Efficiency, for the people listed, was another name for being found.

The same census that made the soul tax possible also helped the army live off the country in peacetime. Regiments were distributed in garrisons and their maintenance was made obligatory on local populations, in districts that did not always match the administrative map. A peasant might now owe a governor, a college, a poll-tax clerk and a nearby regiment, each with its own paper. Popular discontent followed the new count. The state’s answer was not to loosen the levy. It was to station armed men where the levy could be felt.

Peasants were not freed by this efficiency. Serfdom was not loosened. Industrialists received the right to buy peasant serfs for labour in workshops, and a class of enlisted serfs came into being, living in specified areas and bound to factories. The landed nobility’s material position was strengthened by grants of land and of serfs. The people who bore the greatest hardships of wartime construction and recruitment were the peasant serfs and the poorer urban workers. A man might be drafted into an army for life, assigned to a mill, or left on the estate to produce the grain that fed both. Suffering, combined with onerous taxation, provoked revolts, the sharpest of them at Astrakhan in 1705–06 and under Kondraty Bulavin on the Don in 1707–08. Those risings were cruelly put down. Modernisation, in the village, looked like more of the old bondage with new destinations printed on the order.

Labour was another tax. The new city on the Neva was raised in wet ground by men who had not chosen the site, and canal works drew further drafts from a countryside already stripped for the army. State peasants and conscripts were marched to dig, haul, pile timber and die of the work’s ordinary companions: cold, flood, hunger, disease. We should not invent a single death-roll for that building. We should not pretend the city rose by imperial inspiration alone. A capital can be a window towards Europe and, at the same time, a pit into which labour was poured. The window is famous. The pit is the cost. Canals, likewise, were not ornaments. They were ordered water, cut by the same hands that paid the soul tax.

The memory of how power had been secured reached back to 1698. Peter, recalled from his embassy in the West by a fresh revolt of the streltsy in Moscow, suppressed it that summer. Hundreds of the streltsy were executed; the rest of the rebels were exiled to distant towns; the corps was disbanded. This is not the Kremlin massacre of 1682, which belongs to his childhood. It is the later, colder use of a scaffold to finish a force he no longer trusted. The executions taught survivors that the musketeers’ old political weight was over. They also taught everyone else what the new reign would do when it met armed refusal. A programme that needed new soldiers had first to be sure the old ones could not unmake it.

Vasily Surikov painted The Morning of the Streltsy Execution in 1881. It is a nineteenth-century panorama of candlelight, carts, women and condemned men before the Moscow churches, not a report from 1698. The painting has formed how later Russians imagine that morning. It remains a work of historical theatre. Hundreds died; the picture is a later argument about what that dying looked like.

The cost entered the dynasty. Peter had a son, the tsarevich Alexis, by his first wife, Eudoxia, whom he sent to a convent in 1698. Alexis was the natural heir. He grew up antipathetic to Peter’s wars and reforms, close to clergy and to a conservative world his father was dismantling, and he never developed an enthusiasm for the work he was supposed to inherit. Peter, meanwhile, had a second family with the future empress Catherine, and by 1715 another male heir complicated the already sour choice of successor. A царевич is not only a child. He is a future reign. When father and son cannot occupy the same future, the title becomes a charge sheet.

In 1716 Peter pressed Alexis to mend his ways or to become a monk and renounce his hereditary rights. Alexis took refuge in the lands of the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, first under protection in the Habsburg world, then farther south. Peter, fearing that opponents might treat his son as an alternative ruler, sent envoys who induced him to return by promising a pardon. Alexis reached Moscow in early 1718 and discovered that forgiveness depended on renouncing the succession and denouncing those who had helped him flee. He accepted those terms. The investigation did not stop. A promised pardon had become a machine for producing names.

Peter then used extraordinarily cruel methods against Alexis’s supporters, found what he took to be a potential movement of opposition to the reforms, and concluded that his son was involved in a conspiracy. Proceedings for high treason followed. After torture Alexis was condemned to death. He died in prison in St Petersburg on 26 June 1718, before the sentence was formally carried out, presumably by violence. Rumours and later reconstructions have filled the hours between verdict and death with details the surviving record does not all support. What the sources used here will bear is already enough: a son induced home, an investigation of savage cruelty, a death sentence, and a body in a fortress. No further invention is required, and none should be added for colour. The dynasty had been taught the same lesson as the streltsy: opposition would not be left as a family quarrel.

Nikolai Ge’s painting of Peter interrogating Alexis, the image that opens this chapter, was made in 1871. It is psychological theatre: a table, two figures, a silent conflict of wills, a nineteenth-century idea of how a reforming father faced a resistant son. It is not a transcript of 1718, not a portrait from life, and not evidence of what was said in any room. Look at it as later Russians thinking about the reign. Do not look at it as the interrogation. The pathos is Ge’s. The death is the historical fact the painting circles and cannot record.

The death of the tsarevich did not tidy the succession. Alexis left a son who would later reign briefly as Peter II. Of Peter’s children by Catherine, two daughters, Anna and Elizabeth, survived him. In 1722 the emperor reserved to himself the right to name an heir, as if a written will could replace a living tsarevich. He still had time to use that right. He did not. The cost of destroying one future was that no other future had been written down in its place.

Peter himself died in St Petersburg on 8 February 1725, the 28 January of the Old Style calendar he had kept. He was fifty-two. Illness of the bladder and urinary tract, after years of strain, ended the reign. His widow Catherine, whom he had crowned empress in 1724, succeeded him, with the support of men who had risen in his service, to the temporary exclusion of his grandson. The succession law that was meant to prevent a crisis became the opening of one. An unfinished programme left an unfinished throne.

Louis Caravaque painted Peter on his deathbed in 1725: a court painter’s last likeness, seen from above, not a medical record of the night he died. It is contemporary. It still cannot tell us what name, if any, he meant to speak. A finished canvas can close a reign neatly. The succession did not.

The scale of the change is not a verdict. It is a fact that still includes the dead.

What remains is a double inheritance. Russia left the reign a Baltic power, with a new capital, a new service elite, a Church under a Synod, a calendar and a script that looked towards Europe, and a state that could count souls and move men. It also left a countryside more tightly bound, a treasury fed by a poll tax, a memory of scaffolds, a dead heir, and a throne whose next occupant had not been written down. Later ages have wanted Peter to be a single lesson: saviour, tyrant, first modern man, ancestor of later command. The evidence is less obedient. It shows a programme that transformed offices, manners and frontiers, and that paid for the work in labour, fear and blood. The transformation is not cancelled by the violence. The violence is not excused by the transformation. They happened together, which is why the cost still belongs inside the story of the modernisation, not as a footnote beneath it.