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sand-banks of the Caspian, the campaign proved abortive. In December,
1722, however, a Russian army corps, under Colonel Shipoff, seized the
great trading centre of Rescht; and, almost simultaneously, General
Matyushkin stormed Baku, which, as the key of the south-western
Caspian district, Peter had been very anxious to capture. On Sep-
tember 12, 1722, a Persian embassy, then at St Petersburg, was forced to
sign a treaty of peace, ceding Baku, Derbent, and the provinces of
Gilyan, Mazandevan and Astrabad. The Persian Government refused,
however, to ratify the treaty. Only by Peter's threat of a league
of partition against her between Russia and Turkey was the Shah's
Government finally brought to consent to the cession of these provinces.
These acquisitions and the subsequent intrigues of the Russian
Government with the Armenians, with whom Russia now came into
direct communication for the first time, seriously disturbed the Porte.
In August, 1722, the Grand Vezir told the Russian ambassador,
Nepluyeff, that Russia had better declare war against the Porte at once,
and then they would know where they were.
The whole of the Tsar's

reign, he added, had been one uninterrupted war, in which he gave no
rest to his neighbours. Subsequently Nepluyeff reported to his Court
that the Turks intended to conquer Persia and Georgia, and drive the
Russians out of Daghestan. He earnestly advised the Emperor to be
ready for war, as immense stores of ammunition were being constantly
sent to Erzerum and Azoff from Stambul. Fortunately, Turkey was
not ready for war, and the acquisition of the Caspian Provinces by
Russia was a matter of comparative indifference to the Sultan. It was
the spread of Russian influence in the Caucasus that he really feared.
Still, throughout 1723, the aspect of affairs was very threatening.
Peter regarded the Caspian provinces as indispensable; and Nepluyeff
was instructed to inform the Porte that the Russian Emperor would allow
no other Power to approach the Caspian Sea. The English Govern-
ment used every expedient to induce the Porte to declare war, and even
held out the hope of simultaneous co-operation on the part of Great
Britain and Denmark. In the beginning of 1724 Nepluyeff demanded
his passports; but, on June 12, by the Treaty of Constantinople, a
compromise was arrived at: Shemak was to belong to a vassal of the
Porte; but the region extending from Shemak to the Caspian was to be
divided into three parts, two of which, adjacent to the Caspian, were to
belong to Russia, while the third, stretching southwards from Derbent,
was to be divided between Russia and Persia.

The reform of the internal administration engaged Peter's attention immediately after the termination of the Swedish War (1721). He began with the highest tribunal of all, the Administrative Senate. Experience had already shown that the Senators, following the old Muscovite laissezaller principle, were apt to neglect business, disregard the laws, and quash all complaints from inferior tribunals against themselves personally. To

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Fresh administrative reforms

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obviate this, Peter, at the beginning of 1722, instituted the office of the Procurator General, whose duty it was to sit in the Senate and see that the Senators performed their duties "in a faithful, zealous and orderly fashion, according to the direction of the standing rules and ukases." The worst cases were to be reported direct to the sovereign, if the admonition of the Procurator General was of no avail. "He is in fact to be our eye," ran the ukase. It required no ordinary courage and resource to occupy an office which must necessarily embroil its holder with all the highest dignitaries in the State; but Peter found the man he wanted in Paul Yaguzhinsky, the son of the Lutheran organist at Moscow, whose geniality and capability had long endeared him to Peter and who was the only man in Russia who could stand before the Tsar, when in his worst moods, without trembling.

To keep a watchful eye upon defaulters and malingerers among the gentry, the office of Herald-master was instituted, in 1721. This functionary had to keep lists of all the landowners in the Empire, showing who were in the service of the State and who were not, and giving the fullest details as to their families and occupations. A third newly established functionary, the "Master of Petitions," had to examine all the petitions presented to the various departments of State and see that they received proper attention.

But it was of small avail to simplify and specialise the administration, and fence it about with safeguards, so long as the new institutions were infected by the fatal maladies of the old. The most inveterate of these maladies was the universal corruption for which Muscovy had always been notorious; and Peter himself, though he cauterised it freely, could not wholly eradicate the evil. In the course of 1723 and 1724 he made terrible examples of two of his most confidential and meritorious servants, Vice-Chancellor Shafiroff and the Upper-fiscal Nestoroff.

Despite a constant if gradual increase in the revenue, the financial needs of the Government, owing to the expenses of the long war, were heavy, and led to all sorts of ingenious but oppressive fiscal experiments. It was even found necessary, at last, to cut down all official salaries by one-half. The difficulty of housing the soldiers properly led to the introduction of barracks into Russia. At the end of Peter's reign the army numbered 210,000 men, besides 109,000 irregulars. The fleet consisted of 48 ships of the line, with 787 galleys and smaller vessels, whose full complement of crews was 27,939 men. There was also a consider able increase in the mercantile marine, and native Russian merchants now began to appear in the principal non-Russian Baltic ports.

Much also was now done to develop and improve the local administration. In all the towns magistracies were formed, consisting of a president, two burgomasters, and four councillors, whose duty it was to gather all the traders and artisans together and prevent them from drifting into the ranks of the untaxable by flying to the steppes. The

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The succession ordinance

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whole body of citizens was divided into three classes; the first guild, consisting of the chief merchants, doctors, apothecaries and cloth manufacturers; the second guild, consisting of the petty traders and artisans ; and, thirdly, the common people.

By the ukase of January 13, 1724, the foundations were laid of an Academy of Sciences, which was to be a university, a gymnasium, and an elementary school at the same time. The tolls levied on merchandise in the towns of Narva, Dorpat, Reval, and Arenberg were set apart for its maintenance. The Academy also relieved the Synod of the duty of translating and circulating books. After the death of its first President, the Metropolitan Yavorsky, the office of President of the Synod was abolished, but it received a civil assessor in the person of the "Upper procurator of the Synod," May 22, 1722. Another official, the Protoinquisitor, or, "Chief-fiscal in spiritual matters," was to exercise the same supervision over the Synod as "the Procurator General" already exercised over the Senate.

Towards the end of the reign, the question of the succession to the throne caused the Emperor some anxiety. The rightful heir in the natural order of primogeniture was Grand Duke Péter, a child of six; but Peter decided to pass him over because, as the son of the Tsarevich Alexis, any acknowledgment of his rights would, infallibly, have excited the hopes of those people who had sympathised with his father, and the fears of those who had had a hand in the murder of Alexis. Who, then, was to succeed the reigning Emperor? His own daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, were still mere children, and his nieces, the daughters of his brother Ivan, had married foreign princes and were living abroad. The Tsaritsa Catharine alone remained. About 1702 he had picked up Martha Skovronskaya at Menshikoff's house. She had been first his mistress, then, after her conversion to Orthodoxy under the name of Catharine Aleksyevna, his wife. He now resolved to secure the throne for her also. That curious document, the ustaff, or ordinance, of 1712, heralded this unheard-of innovation. Time-honoured custom had hitherto reckoned primogeniture in the male line as the best title to the Russian Crown; in the ustaff of 1722 Peter denounced primogeniture in general as a stupid, dangerous, and even unspiritual practice. He concluded by declaring the succession to the Russian Empire to be, in future, absolutely dependent on the will of the reigning sovereign.

The succession ustaff was but a preliminary step to a still more sensational novelty. In 1723 Peter resolved to crown his consort, the Tsaritsa Catharine, Empress. The whole question as to what were the proper titles of the Emperor's family had previously been submitted to the consideration of the Senate and Synod, which decided that Catharine should be called Imperatritsa, or its Slavonic equivalent Tsesareva, while the princesses were to be no longer Tsarevnas (daughters of a Tsar) but Tsesarevnas (daughters of an Emperor). On November 15, 1723, Peter

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issued a second manifesto, in which he proceeded, at some length and in very affectionate terms, to cite the services rendered to him by his Tsesareva in the past, especially during the Turkish War. "Wherefore," proceeds the manifesto, "by the authority given unto us by God, we have resolved to reward such great services of our consort by crowning her with the Imperial crown." The whole nation listened aghast to the manifesto. The only princess who had ever enjoyed the same distinction was Maria Minszka, the consort of the first pseudo-Dimitri, in the sixteenth century, and, heretic as she was, she had at least been of noble birth. The present Empress had come to Russia not merely as a stranger, but as a captive; yet now, forsooth, she was to wear the Imperial crown and sit on the Imperial throne! On this point, however, Peter was utterly regardless of the feelings and the prejudices of his people. And, in truth, Catharine, coarse and ignorant as she was, had inalienable claims upon his gratitude and affection. An uncommonly shrewd and sensible woman, endowed with an imperturbable good-humour, and an absolute indifference to the hardships of a roving life, she was an ideal wife for a rough and ready peripatetic Russian soldier. But, more than this, she was, on the whole, the least unsuitable of Peter's potential suc cessors. Her frank bonhomie had won for her the devotion of the army, every member of which regarded her as a comrade; while a vivid consciousness of the peril of her position had made her deliberately adopt, betimes, the rôle of an habitual protectress of all who incurred the displeasure of the Emperor; so that most of the men of the new system had already made up their minds to stand or fall with her. On May 18, 1724, the coronation of Catharine took place in the cathedral of the Assumption at Moscow, with extraordinary pomp and splendour.

In the course of the same summer the state of Peter's health caused grave anxiety. His labours and his excesses had already undermined his splendid constitution; and, though not yet fifty-three years of age, he was already an old man. On October 3 he had another very violent attack of his paroxysms. Yet in the same month, ignoring the advice of his physicians, he undertook a long and fatiguing tour of inspection of the latest of his great public works, the Ladoga canals, proceeding thence to inspect the iron-works at Olonets, where he dug out a piece of iron ore, 120 lbs. in weight. In the beginning of November, at Lakhta, perceiving a boat full of soldiers on a sand-bank, in imminent danger of being drowned, he plunged into the water to render them assistance and was immersed to his girdle for a considerable time. He reached St Petersburg too ill ever to rally again, though he showed himself in public so late as January 16, 1725. After a long and most painful agony, he died at six o'clock on the evening of the 27th. All that could be deciphered of his last message, painfully scrawled with pen and ink on a piece of paper, were the words "otdaite vse!" (forgive everything!).

When Peter I expired, prematurely and somewhat suddenly, at the

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Accession of Catharine I

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beginning of 1725, it was the confident expectation of the politicians of Europe that his work would perish with him. During the last thirty years, the terrorised Russian nation had been compelled to break with the traditions of centuries and accept a whole series of social and political reforms secretly loathed by it as so many abominations; but, now that the master-mind was withdrawn, a recoil seemed inevitable and, to the enemies of Russia, desirable. But for the promptitude of the halfdozen capable men whom Peter, with singular felicity, had gradually selected and trained up to assist him in his work, and carry it on after his death, a lapse into "the quagmire of Byzantinism" must inevitably have taken place. The stern and ever increasing severity of the late Emperor's system of government had produced universal discontent-a discontent the more bitter and intense because, hitherto, denied an outlet. The vast majority of the clergy, at least half the Senate (though that was a purely Petrine institution) and all the old boiar nobility without exception, were ripe for revolt, and they made no secret of their intention of elevating to the throne the infant Grand Duke, Peter Aleksyevich. The reactionaries included more than a half of the wealth of Russia, and nearly all the influence that unofficial rank still retained in that country; but their faction was much weakened by internal dissensions and possessed no leader of sufficient force of character. On the other hand, Peter's pupils, as we may call the opposite party, led by Alexander Danilovich Menshikoff, Peter Andryevich Tolstoi and Paul Ivanovich Yaguzhinsky, were men of extraordinary energy, sufficiently enlightened to understand perfectly the real needs of their country, and well aware that a moment's hesitation on their part would mean the subversion of Peter's system and their own ruin. These three men detested each other as rivals; but common interests and a common danger now drew them together, and they were agreed that the only way of preserving the new system was to raise to Peter's throne the widowed Empress Catharine Aleksyevna. The energy and presence of mind of her partisans overawed all opposition. Only a few moments after her consort had breathed his last in her arms, a deputation from the Senate, army and nobility petitioned her to occupy the vacant throne, and on February 22, 1725, Catharine I was solemnly proclaimed autocrat of all Russia.

Her short reign (February, 1725 to May, 1727) was chiefly remarkable for its humane and conciliatory measures at home, and its cautious, pacific, but, nevertheless, dignified, consistent and independent policy abroad. Something was done to mitigate the suffering of the nation. The grinding poll-tax was reduced; a large part of the army was disbanded; many of the restrictions upon commerce imposed during the last reign were removed; attempts were made to stimulate the copper, iron and other industries. But at home the Government was able to effect but little. Time alone could teach the nation at large

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