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General Character of the Reforms: The Collaborators of Peter the Great
1. The way for the reforms of Peter the Great had been made smooth by those of Alexis, and by all the movement of the 17th century. Under the Ivans, under Boris, under the early Romanofs, Russia had been gradually thrown open to strangers. It by no means followed that the whole country was disposed to follow Peter the Great in his innovations. Opposed to him were those who had refused to accept the reforms of Nicon, and many who, while accepting them, had no idea of going further. The raskols, and certain members of the State Church, were his enemies; the Russian people were more averse to innovation than any in Europe. "Novelty brings calamity," says a proverb; the nobles were also hostile to everything that could contribute to autocratic centralization.
Peter the Great found, then, a steady resistance among the majority of the nation; to conquer it, where persuasion and his own example did not suffice, he employed the energy of his semi-barbarous character, and the terrible resources of absolute power. By main force he dragged the nation in the path of progress; at every page of his reforming edicts we find the knout and the penalty of death.
2. These innovations effected by the prince were not intended to prejudice his own authority; nay, they had, we may say, for their sole end the transformation of a patriarchal into a modern despotism. The force of the government was to be increased without any essential change in its character. The Tzar remained as much an autocrat as Ivan the Terrible, but his authority was to be exercised by means of more perfect instruments, and by agents subjected to the disciplines and rules of the West.
3. The mass of the people still remained serfs and attached to the soil, - twenty millions of human beings were the property of the territorial oligarchy; but, notwithstanding, the Russian nation was to be furnished with the instruments necessary to enter into regular communications with the free people of Europe. Russia was to seem a state centralized and civilized like the France of Louis XIV, yet the patriarchal and Asiatic principle, which, confounding paternal and...