Peter the Great put Russia in a Swedish uniform

Throughout history Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia, and the German Hansa and north German states have fought to control the ports and the littorals of the Baltic Sea in order to direct trade, levy tolls and taxes, and have naval bases. The Dutch Republic and England/Britain have intervened to ensure trade flows freely and is not controlled by any single power. From the 16th century on, the early modern states of Muscovy, Sweden, Denmark and Poland-Lithuania competed for control. The interchange took the form of warfare, diplomacy, trade and cultural intercourse.

Even before contemporary Sweden and Russia became states, their Rus’ ancestors in Novgorod and in Roslagen met, fought wars and nurtured commercial contacts in the area around the estuaries of the Ochta and Neva/Nyen rivers in Ingria on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Finland.

The medieval Kievan chronicle, ‘The Tale of Bygone Years’, has the story of Swedish-Rus’ coexistence starting in 862 AD, when the local inhabitants invited the Viking chieftain Rurik from Roslagen to come to Ingria and establish order. According to this medieval legend, the same people, the Rus’, founded the states that were to become Sweden and Ukraine. In the year 1240, Novgorod forces under Prince Alexander Yaroslavich defeated Swedish invaders commanded by Birger Jarl on the ice of the Neva; the prince became known as Alexander Nevsky. In 1293, the Swedes founded a fortress, Viborg, on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Finland. In 1323 Sweden and Novgorod signed a treaty of mutual recognition in the fortress of Nöteborg at the outlet of the Ladoga into the Neva. An exact boundary wasn’t defined. The frontier was Finland with Karelia, with Ingria.

In 1478 Novgorod was conquered by a duchy that had emerged in the forest lands to the east. During the next two centuries, Muscovy attempted to establish itself as a Baltic state and fought wars for hegemony in the region with Sweden and Poland-Lithuania. Similarly, when Muscovy was transformed into the Russian Empire, it aimed to become a Black Sea state, conquer Constantinople and reach the Mediterranean. Ideologically, as manifested in heraldic symbols and in architecture, the traditions of the Roman Empire and of the Byzantine Empire were recalled. In the 16th century, the idea that Moscow had become a third Rome after the fall of the original one in 476 AD and of the second (Constantinople) in 1453 was eclipsed by reference to the first two empires. Peter I recalled the original Rome; Catherine II recalled Constantinople.

In the Middle Ages and in the early modern era, two militarily, economically and politically strong ‘German’ organisations had hegemony in the Baltic: the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Order. They linked the region to the rest of Europe in terms of economy, technology, religion and law. German actors became the agents of Europeanisation, although the native Scandinavians actively adapted to the new order and helped to give it a special Baltic flavour. In the hinterland of the lands of the Teutonic Order were the Polish kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as well as Sovereign Lord Novgorod the Great (Gospodin Veliky Novgorod). In the late 14th century, the states in Scandinavia and in the south-eastern Baltic Sea region challenged the two German organisations. They forged the Unions of Kalmar and Krewo respectively. Within this framework, national states were consolidated: Sweden (with Finland), Denmark (with Norway) and Poland (with Lithuania). During this process, Muscovy also entered the Baltic Sea arena, taking over Novgorod’s old role. In the 16th century the Hansa gradually lost influence, while the Teutonic Order dissolved and disappeared.

Economically, militarily, technologically and culturally, the Netherlands was a main actor in the Baltic Sea region in the 17th century. In the 18th century, Russia and Prussia became the major powers. In a similar way as Sweden has been seen as a self-evident Baltic state, Prussia and Russia have been regarded as such, although Russia expanded to the south and to the east, into Asia, beginning in the period of Sweden’s ascendancy in the Baltic Sea region. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Netherlands and England were the main naval powers in the region and helped make it what it became in terms of economy and culture.

After the peace of Westphalia in 1648, Sweden and the Netherlands became rivals. This fact probably saved both Denmark and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from falling prey to Sweden. The Dutch navy saw to it that Sweden could not acquire hegemony in the Baltic Sea. In the early 18th century, both Swedish and Dutch power in the region were in decline. Before leaving the scene, they each bestowed some of their administrative, military and maritime skills on the rising new power in the Baltic Sea region: Muscovy, which became Russia. The influence was epitomised in the townscape and institutions of the latter’s new capital, St Petersburg. It is possible to argue that St Petersburg and Gothenburg (on the North Sea coast of Sweden) have the same Dutch ancestry. St Petersburg owes something, if not to Gothenburg then to the Swedish modernisation project of which Gothenburg was a part. Today, New Holland is a romantic island in the River Moika in downtown St Petersburg. This and the ‘lines’ on Vasilevsky Island – streets that were originally meant to be canals – are visible traces of the Dutch model.

In the 16th to 18th centuries a link was forged between the eastern Baltic and the North Sea. Gothenburg and St Petersburg connected Sweden and Russia not only to the North Sea states but also to the rest of Europe and to the whole world. For more than 200 years St Petersburg was the capital of Russia, whereas Gothenburg had to be content with being the most significant commercial port in Sweden. As is well known, in Russian culture St Petersburg is the western, European city, in stark contrast to the Eurasian metropolis, Moscow.

In 1521, the Kalmar Union of the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden was dissolved. Over the course of the next 100 years Sweden eclipsed Denmark-Norway as the major power in Scandinavia. Its politics aimed to control Baltic trade by incorporating its eastern shore into the emerging Swedish Baltic empire on the one hand, and establishing a stronghold on the North Sea coast on the other. It was important to break not only Denmark’s grip on the Straits of Öresund but also to curb the Hanseatic League and push both the Polish Commonwealth and Muscovy with Novgorod away from the Baltic coast in the east. For the next 300 years Sweden and Muscovy were engaged in consecutive wars for control of the eastern Baltic littoral. Denmark and Poland challenged Sweden during the 17th century. In the end, Poland disappeared from the map and Denmark ceased to be a serious rival.

In 1606 Charles IX of Sweden contacted Tsar Vasily Shuisky in order to secure an ally against Poland. In 1608 the tsar reacted in a positive way and asked the king to help him defend Novgorod and Muscovy against Poland. The following year the Swedish king and the Muscovite tsar concluded a defence alliance. A Swedish army under Jacob De la Gardie marched via Novgorod to Moscow. However, in 1610 the Polish army defeated the Swedish and Muscovite forces outside Moscow. Shuisky was dethroned and the Polish prince Władysław was elected tsar. The Swedes concentrated their interest on Novgorod. In 1611 De la Gardie occupied the city. He was recognised by the local leaders as its protector. The idea was that one of the sons of Charles IX should become tsar of Novgorod and that Muscovy should be offered as an enticement. Sweden occupied Novgorod until after the peace treaty with Muscovy at Stolbova in 1617.

In his instructions to the Swedish negotiators in 1613 the new Swedish king, Gustav II Adolf, assured that, if his brother Charles Philip was elected Grand Duke of Novgorod, ‘no foreign nation, neither Germans, Danes, Poles nor subjects of the Polish crown, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Scots nor others would be allowed thereafter to engage in any trade in Russia via the Baltic, neither with Pskov, Novgorod nor other places’. If Charles Philip wasn’t elected, Pskov and Novgorod should be placed under Swedish command. Only Swedes, Finns and Livonians should be allowed to trade with the two Russian cities. Ships from Novgorod should have to go to Viborg and Åbo (Turku) and deliver their goods there. Those from Pskov should go to Stockholm. If all these plans came to nothing, Sweden would instead demand the right to stop merchants of other nations approaching the Russian market by way of Archangel or the Baltic ports. However, whereas the Treaty of Stolbova gave Sweden additional territories in the east, the plans to incorporate Novgorod and Pskov came to nothing.

In certain respects, 17th-century Sweden became a model for 18th-century Russia. Peter the Great copied the Swedish administrative system and tried to organise the Russian government accordingly. His choice of model was far from accidental; it was spurred by an intimate knowledge of Sweden. It was a vital part of Peter’s conscious policy to transform Muscovy into a modern western European state: in Russian the terms ‘modernisation’, ‘Europeanisation’ and ‘Westernisation’ all denote the same concept. The project had been prepared under the second Romanov tsar, Peter’s father, Alexei Mikhailovich.

Tsar Alexei realised that if Muscovy were to build up military forces, develop industries and defend its interests against Sweden, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, it would be necessary to open the capital to foreign merchants and to hire western European officers. In 1652, a special ‘settlement for foreigners’ (Nemetskaya Sloboda) was created on the outskirts of Moscow. The 19th-century Russian historian VO Klyuchevsky called Nemetskaya Sloboda ‘a corner of western Europe that was located in an eastern suburb of Moscow’.

In Nemetskaya Sloboda there was a school, Protestant churches and busy city life. This foreign presence in the hitherto isolated Moscow environment triggered resistance from some of the Russian Orthodox clergy. The conflict ended in Patriarch Nikon reforming the Church in the mid-17th century. The Orthodox Church lost its ideological hegemony among the Muscovite elite.

Peter Alexeyevich, the future Peter the Great, was born in 1672. In 1682 he, together with his brother Ivan, inherited the throne. He became a steady visitor to the Nemetskaya Sloboda. In this environment he became socialised in contemporary western European frames of reference. When he in mature years ventured into the project of transforming Muscovy, he remarked that Russia was Europe’s pupil who, after the victory over Sweden at Poltava, had finally passed the examination. It stands to reason that for Peter it was not any introduction of a ‘foreign’ model but of something that had developed in Muscovy’s ‘significant other’ – Sweden.

The area around the Neva that Sweden conquered became known as Ingermanland (Ingria). In Russian, these lands were called Izhorskaya Zemlja. The Russian historian Yevgeny Anisimov observes that Sweden ousted ethnic Russians from the territory. In 1623, Russians constituted 89.5 per cent of the population, but only 26.2 per cent in 1695. Anisimov notes that the idea to re-take this part of the Novgorod duchy remained on the agenda of the rulers of Muscovy. During the wars with Sweden in the 17th century, ‘in all negotiations with the Swedes the Russian diplomats persistently sought the return of the lost Izhora land’. The lands were given as fiefdoms to the Swedish governors Bernhard S. von Steenhusen, Karl Karlsson Gyllenhielm and Johan Skytte. In 1695-97, the area was hit by crop failure and famine. The population of 66,000 in 1696 had diminished by a third in 1699.

In late 17th-century Ingria, Sweden had an array of fortresses: Narva (also an important merchant town), Ivangorod (opposite Narva), Koporje, Kexholm, Nöteborg and Nyenskans (at the town Nyen). In the early 1300s the marshal Torgils Knutsson, who founded the fortress and merchant town of Viborg in 1293, had built the Landskrona fortress there. This had soon been taken by Novgorod and destroyed. After the peace of Stolbova, Sweden controlled the Neva estuary. The town of Nyen was built on the right bank of the River Ochta. The burghers in the town were Swedes and Germans. At the outskirts lived Russians, Ingrians and Finns. Yevgenii Anisimov notes that Nyen was a typical Swedish Baltic town with a town hall, a lively market square and a Protestant church (kyrka in Swedish, kircha in Russian). At the end of the 17th century there were some 400 houses and 1,500 inhabitants. Peter I visited in April 1703 and in a letter to his counsellor Alexander Menshikov he praised the town. Anisimov concludes: ‘From here the Russian merchants possessed a straight water route to Stockholm and other Baltic ports that they could use permanently and without hindrance, because the Swedes were not interested in interrupting the beneficial Russian trade.’

The Swedish governor-general of Livonia, Erik Dahlbergh, noted in 1681 that control of Ingria was vitally important for Sweden. He warned that if Nyen fell, neither Kexholm nor Nöteborg would be able to protect Karelia, the province of Kexholm or Viborg. The Muscovites would occupy the area and ‘get free way into the Baltic Sea, which has been their dream since time immemorial’. In 1698, Dahlbergh complained that Nyenskans was ‘worthless’ as a fortress and asked the government in Stockholm to strengthen the defence of the Neva estuary – in vain.

In 1699-1700, Peter I formed a Nordic union between Muscovy, Denmark, Saxony and Poland-Lithuania against Sweden. The war aims were described in Muscovite documents as reconquering lands that had been unjustly seized by the Swedes. In addition, the war was to be revenge for the refusal by the governor-general of Livonia to let the Great Embassy of Muscovy, which visited Riga in 1697, inspect the city’s fortifications. Though incognito, Peter was a member of the embassy.

The Great Nordic War started in the year 1700 with Muscovy’s attack on the Swedish fortress at Narva. It ended in 1721 with the victory of Muscovy and the peace treaty at Nystad. Sweden had to cede to Muscovy parts of the Viborg and Kexholm counties and all of Ingria, Estonia (with the islands of Saaremaa and Dagö) and Livonia. The war aims of Peter I were fulfilled.

After his victory over Sweden in the Great Nordic War, Peter, who was nominally tsar of Muscovy, in 1721 renamed the Grand Duchy the Russian Empire (Rossiiskaya Imperiya). He used the Hellenistic form, Rosia, and not the Slavic Rus’, which would have rendered the adjective Russkaya. In 1703, when Peter had conquered Ingria, he founded the city of Sankt Piterburkh – Saint Petersburg – on the estuary of the Neva. In 1712, following the victory over Sweden at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, he made this new city the capital of Muscovy. It was named after the apostle Peter, who had brought Christianity to ancient Rome. The spelling in Russian was a transcription from Dutch. Peter the Great wanted to demonstrate that his capital was European and that the naval power of the Netherlands was a model for the new Russia he was creating.

Since the Vatican had two crossed keys on its coat of arms – the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven – St Petersburg had two crossed anchors on its coat of arms. The city was ‘anchored’ in the Baltic Sea, in all seas. Before his Great Embassy to Europe in the 1690s, Peter had himself portrayed as a Roman emperor, as imperator. The Russian Empire was the successor to the Roman Empire and equal to its other successor, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which at that time was ruled by the Habsburgs. In 1721, Peter was proclaimed ‘Imperator’. The title suggested a direct link to the Roman Empire.

All this was a symbolic break from the Muscovite state and its Byzantine mythology, where the tsar was divine and the defender of the faith. Peter abolished the Muscovite patriarchate and subordinated the church to the state. This was a break with the Byzantine tradition of equity between church and state, the symbiosis. The new order was reminiscent of the relationship between state and church in Lutheran Sweden.

Although Sweden and Muscovy were at war from 1700 to 1721 this did not mean that the societies as such were isolated from one another. After the Swedish military victory at Narva in 1700, Russian officers were taken as prisoners of war to Sweden, and, after the Muscovite victory at Poltava in 1709, Swedish officers were taken as prisoners of war in Muscovy. Individuals in both categories contributed to Peter’s appropriation of the Swedish ‘model’.

According to the Swedish legal scholar Claes Peterson, Peter’s aim was to create a Russian administrative structure that was similar to the Swedish one. Peterson quotes the historian Klyuchevsky’s designation of Peter’s rule as ‘the epoch of Swedomania’: Russia was dressed up in a Swedish uniform.

The Russian officers imprisoned in Sweden were able to correspond with Tsar Peter. In 1715 General Ivan Trubetskoi received a letter from Peter with instructions to find out how the Swedish administration was organised. But Trubetskoi was a prisoner of war. He could not move freely in Stockholm. He could not carry out his orders. Instead, Peter sent to Stockholm Heinrich Fick from Hamburg, who had been in Swedish service from 1700 to 1710 and had then gone into the tsar’s service.

Fick socialised in Stockholm’s upper circles and was able to receive detailed information about the Swedish administrative structure. He managed to acquire a book that contained 800 Swedish statutes from 1528 to 1701. He visited the Swedish administrative boards – ‘kollegier’ – and copied numerous documents. Finally, he succeeded in bringing all these to Tsar Peter in St Petersburg.

Inspired by the Swedish model, Russia got a Senate that oversaw a Kamerkollegiya, a Shtatsrevizionkollegiya, a Kommerzkollegiya, a Berg- i Manufakturkollegiya, a Krigskollegiya, an Admiralteyskaya kollegiya and a Yustitsikollegiya. The latter was based on the Swedish high court, the Svea hovrätt.

Yevgeny Anisimov underlines the importance of Peter’s personal initiative. When he travelled in Europe in 1716-17, Peter studied the state structure in Denmark, Sweden, France and elsewhere in order to be able to apply his knowledge in Russia. As a consequence, the innovations in Russia’s governmental structure were built upon this experience of different European countries, not only Sweden. The innovations concerned central and the local administration, legislation, courts of justice, finances, town and church administration and also changes in social life.

Peter was pragmatic. When he copied the structure and working practice of western institutions, he used only those elements that would not harm the genuine foundations of Muscovy: autocracy and serfdom. Peter is reported to have uttered, defining the limits to this imitation: ‘English liberty is as out of the question here as peas on a wall. One has to know the people in order to be able to rule over them.’ Many of the administrative developments in Russia were linked to the police regime and the custom of cruel punishments for breaking the new laws.

Peter the Great was the first to propagate the idea that he created a new Russia. He was the master but, as noted above, he actually launched the thesis of Russia as the ‘disciple’ of Europe. When he applied the foreign models, Peter consequently erased everything that smacked of local autonomy or parliamentarianism, Anisimov notes. In the face of a proposal to introduce the Swedish system of local self-rule to the Russian counties, the Senate answered, following Peter’s dictum: ‘There are not any reasonable people among the peasants.’ Anisimov argues that this view of the Russian people became a fateful element of Peter’s legacy:

This was said about a people whose organisation of local councils and the People’s Militia based upon these in 1612 saved both the monarchy and Russia from perdition… In Russia one forgot forever the importance of the Council of the Land [Zemsky Sobor] and of civic self-government as the foundations of civil society.

The political inquiry (sysk) became one of the most important of Peter’s innovations. The old Preobrazhensky Chancellery was transformed into the Secret Chancellery. It became mandatory for everybody to shout loudly in public ‘slovom i delom’ – ‘in word and in deed’ – and to inform the Secret Chancellery’s policemen whenever a person broke the law or swore in public or criticised the government. According to Anisimov, this was the second fateful element of Peter’s legacy: ‘The whole system of social relations was built upon the fact that every subject ran the risk of becoming either an accused, a witness or an informer.’ Neglecting to shout slovom i delom was a criminal offence, and a person who did not inform was cruelly persecuted.

Peter abolished the patriarchate and supplanted it with the Holy Synod, a state institution. Anisimov observes that Peter not only made the Church an instrument of his propaganda. He also obliged the Church to take part in the political inquiries. According to a decree from 1722, priests were obliged to report to the Secret Chancellery if a member of the community said something in confession that might be a crime against the state.

From Peter onwards there were two Russian worlds, the dynamic western Europe of Peter and the aristocracy – and, from the 19th century, the intelligentsia – and the stagnant Orthodox world of the people, the peasants.

Peter did use a Swedish model. However, he actively dismissed the notion of a civil society as the foundation of the administrative superstructure. At the basis of the Swedish administrative system lay the local parishes of the Lutheran state church. The local priest acted as a go-between. He was a caretaker for the interests of the farmers and peasants at the same time as he saw to it that the local population served the crown and the law. Moreover, the Swedish Church Ordinance of 1686 made it mandatory that individuals be literate, in order to be able to read the catechism and the proclamations of the state. There was the Swedish parliament of four estates. Peter’s Senate did not resemble a parliament at all. It was a council that served the autocrat.

Peter did not refer to any outspoken conscious geopolitical ideology. Rather, he asserted that Muscovy – Russia – had been present on the eastern Baltic shore since time immemorial and was its rightful ‘owner’. Using modern terms, one might say that Peter viewed the manifest destiny of Russia to be to control both the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. Peter’s Russia was not able to unite the central and Baltic provinces to such a degree that it is possible to speak of a successful integration of them. Partly as a legacy of Swedish times, the Baltic provinces had a more diversified administrative structure than the Russian state. Until the modernisation drive under Catherine II in the late 18th century, the estates of the nobility and the bourgeoisie could even strengthen their institutions. The Russian Empire became a conglomerate state. It did not develop into a modern nation state according to either the French citizen model or the German ethnocultural – Volk – variety.

Geopolitics is a concept that belongs to military history and a rather coarse or banal ‘realist’ school of thought. It does not refer to the ‘content’ of countries, i.e. to the inhabitants of territories, to society. The subjects of Peter the Great were not citizens and the inhabitants of the Russian Empire, of the Soviet Union and of the contemporary Russian Federation never became citizens.

Like a legion of scholars and thinkers in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, the Russian journalist Mikhail Shishkin argues that Russia has not managed to liberate itself from the burden of a millennium of the people’s unconditional surrender to the powers that be. This history started, Shishkin holds, with the invitation in 862 of a foreign chieftain, the Varangian Rurik, to create order among the warring different tribes in Rus’. Varangian rule was followed by the rule of the Mongol khans in 1237–1480. Then came the Muscovite grand dukes and tsars, to be followed by the Russian emperors, the Soviet dictators and, finally, presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin. Shishkin concludes that, in Russia democracy is not viewed as an alternative to dictatorship. Freedom is not understood as an alternative to serfdom. Instead, dictatorship is greeted as an antidote to anarchy, as order against chaos.

One aspect of Vladimir Putin’s use of history as an argument for his aggressive foreign policy is his reference to the legacy of Peter the Great. On the occasion of the celebration of the 350th birthday of Peter, Putin hailed Peter’s reconquest of Narva in 1704. Vestigia terrent.

This essay was originally published in The Baltic Sea: A Geopolitical History, edited by Peter Haldén and published by Bokförlaget Stolpe.