The Reformer of Russia carried a law which puts to shame many a civilized state; by this law no member of the civil service, no “bourgeois” with an established position, and no minor, might enter a monastery. Peter quite grasped the importance of not allowing useful subjects to take up idleness as a profession, nor those who had not yet command of the least part of their fortune to renounce liberty for ever.
The Czar not only, after the example of the Turkish Sultans, subjected the Church to the State, but, by a greater stroke of policy, he destroyed a band of troops like the Janissaries; and that which the Ottoman Emperors failed to do, he succeeded in very rapidly; he disbanded the Russian Janissaries, called Strelitz, who had dominated the Czars. This band, feared rather by its masters than its neighbours, consisted of about 30,000 infantry, half stationed at Moscow, and the other half at various points on the frontier; a member of the Strelitz only drew pay at the rate of four roubles a year, but privileges and abuses amply made up for this.
Peter at first formed a band of mercenaries, in which he had himself enrolled, and was not too proud to begin as drummer-boy, so much were the people in need of good example. He became officer by degrees, made new regiments from time to time, and at last, finding himself at the head of disciplined troops, broke up the Strelitz, who were afraid to disobey him.
The cavalry resembled that of Poland, and that of France in the days when France was only a collection of fiefs. Russian noblemen took the field at their own expense, and engaged without discipline, and sometimes unarmed but for a sabre and a quiver; they were quite unused to discipline, and so were always beaten.
Peter the Great taught them to obey, both by example and by punishment. For he himself served as a soldier and subordinate officer, and as Czar severely punished the “boyards,” as the noblemen were called, who argued that the privilege of the nobility was to serve the State in their own way. He instituted a regular corps of artillery, and seized 500 church bells to cast cannon. By the year 1714 he had 13,000 brass cannon. He also formed a corps of dragoons, a form of arm both suited to Russian capacity and for which their horses, which are small, are particularly fit.
Russia has, at the present day (1738), thirty well-equipped regiments of dragoons of 1,000 men each.
He it was, too, who established the hussars in Russia; he even got a school of engineers in a country where he was the first to understand the elements of geometry.
He was a good engineer himself; but he excelled especially in seamanship. As he was born with an extreme fear of the sea, it is all the greater credit to him that he was a good captain, a skilful pilot, a good seaman, and a clever carpenter. Yet in his young days he could not cross a bridge without a shudder; and he had the wooden shutters of his carriage closed on these occasions. It was his courage and will which led him to overcome this constitutional weakness.
He had built on the Gulf of Tanais, near Azov, a fine port; his idea was to keep a fleet of galleys there, and as he considered that these long, flat, light craft would be successful in the Baltic, he had 300 of them built in his favourite town of Petersburg. He taught his subjects how to construct them from ordinary fir, and then how to manage them.
The revenue of the Czar was inconsiderable, compared with the immense size of his empire. It never exceeded twenty-four millions, reckoning the mark as £50, as we do at the present moment; but, after all, only he is rich who can do great deeds. Russia is not densely populated, though the women are prolific and the men are strong. Peter himself, by the very civilization of his empire, contributed to its population. The causes of the fact that there are still vast deserts in this great stretch of the continent are to be sought in frequent recruiting for unsuccessful wars, the transporting of nations from the Caspian to the Baltic, the destruction of life in the public works, the ravages wrought by disease (three-quarters of the children dying of small-pox), and the sad result of a means of government long savage, and barbarous even in its civilization. The present population of Russia consists of 500,000 noble families, 200,000 lawyers, rather more than 5,000,000 “bourgeois” and peasants paying a kind of poll-tax, and 600,000 men in the provinces conquered from the Swedes; so that this immense realm does not contain more than 14,000,000 men; that is to say, two-thirds of the population of France.