Peter the Great's Special Book

Personally commissioned and approved by Peter the Great, a short book of some 60 pages and 20,000 words was published in Moscow in 1722. Its title was Pravda Voli Monarshei or ‘The Monarch’s Right to Appoint the Heir to His Throne’, but its wider purpose was to reassert the doctrine of divine right absolutism in Russia, at the very time when the concept was beginning to lose its authority in the West. Thomas Consett, Anglican chaplain to the British community at St Petersburg, aptly described it as ‘the famous book’ and ‘that special book’. Its defence of Peter’s right to dictate the succession, though not unprecedented in Russian history, came as a heavy blow to the majority of Peter’s subjects as well as to the small educated minority who looked to the West for examples of limited monarchy. Dramatic fluctuations in the status and authority of the book from 1723 to 1730 bring out its importance as a document of state far removed from the spirit of comparable western documents such as the British Bill of Rights of 1688.

No question weighed more heavily with Peter the Great in the last decade of his reign than the survival of his reforms. Widespread hostility to the nature and pace of westernisation, revealed in 1718 by an investigation into the treasonable activities of his son, the Tsarevich Alexei, came as a shock to Peter, added to his fears for the future and strengthened his determination to ensure the continuity of his policies after his death. The Tsarevich, who symbolised attachment to the old ways, was compelled, before his own condemnation and death, to renounce his right of succession in favour of his infant stepbrother, Peter Petrovich, Peter’s son by his second wife, Catherine. When Peter Petrovich died in 1719, Peter took on the right to appoint a successor ‘at the volition and by virtue of the sovereign power of His Tsarist Majesty’, a right which he formalised three years later in 1722 in a fundamental statute. Allegiance to the statute was exacted from Russians and foreign residents by a compulsory oath enforced by the army. 

Peter’s statute, says the historian M.S. Anderson, represented ‘an exercise of uncontrolled power unparalleled in any other monarch of the period’. Its immediate effect was to dash the hopes of traditionalists – who constituted the bulk of the nation – for whom, as generally in Europe, the accepted order of succession to the throne was by primogeniture in the male line and for whom the rightful heir was the seven–year-old Peter Alexeevich, son of the late Tsarevich Alexei. It was for that reason – the attachment of the traditionalists to Peter Alexeevich – that Peter the Great deliberately broke with custom and took the controversial step of reserving to the reigning monarch the right to decide the succession.

Peter commissioned Pravda Voli Monarshei as an authoritative commentary on his 1722 statute. It was to be a comprehensive vindication of the statute, written, as its title-page says, ‘for the benefit of honest but ignorant people’. Its stated purpose was to marginalise opponents, ‘to remove the least trace of doubt from the minds of the ignorant and to leave no room for misunderstanding’ and ‘to silence foolish but stubborn critics’. It thus had a twofold role: as a piece of ‘instruction’ for loyal subjects and as a warning to opponents and troublemakers. As the foreword states:

The sole reason for writing this booklet is that there are among our people such restless minds and hearts seething with the passion to contradict, that they will not approve any enactment laid down by the ruling power … and they sow seeds of rebellion in our country and give foreigners a dishonourable notion of the Russian people as one of barbarous manners.      

The immediate message of the book, set out in the title, is reiterated in the foreword and afterword and expounded and amplified throughout, supported by quotations from Scripture, the Church Fathers, classical and modern authors and jurists and illustrated by examples drawn from secular and Old Testament history so that, as the afterword puts it, ‘if our harshest critic sought to contradict us, he would find no grounds on which to do so’. 

As well as justifying Peter’s right to appoint his heir, however, Pravda Voli Monarshei contains a second message, complementing the first and elaborated at length, namely the sovereign’s unfettered right to do ‘whatever he pleases’ for the good of the state and the corresponding duty incumbent on his subjects of unconditional obedience and willing compliance with his orders. In this regard Pravda Voli Monarshei has been accurately described as ‘the chief ideological manifesto of Petrine absolutism’.  

Absolutism had been explicit in Peter’s legislation since at least 1716, when the Military Statute defined his prerogative:

His Majesty is a sovereign monarch, who need not account to his actions to anyone on earth, but, as a Christian sovereign, has the power and authority to govern his realms and territories according to his own will and at his discretion.

The corollary to this was emphasised in the Spiritual Regulation of 1721, in which the emperor was defined as ‘a sovereign and absolute monarch’, submission to whose ‘supreme power not only from fear, but also for conscience sake, God himself commands’. These two interdependent concepts, the Tsar’s omnipotence and the subjects’ duty of total submission, also form the leitmotif of Pravda Voli Monarshei, which declares that the Tsar’s ‘power to command and to act is absolute and is not subject to anyone’s scrutiny’, hence ‘no sovereign monarch is obliged to observe man-made law’ and a monarch ‘cannot be judged by men’. These claims are based on ‘natural reason’ and more especially on divine authority, citing numerous biblical injunctions, notably Paul’s admonition in Romans, 13, repeatedly quoted, that ‘the Powers that Be are ordained of God’. 

Peter commissioned Pravda Voli Monarshei from the recently founded Most Holy Governing Synod, which directed the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church after the Tsar’s abolition of the patriarchate and which was at least as much an instrument of state indoctrination and propaganda as of church regulation. He entrusted the writing of the book to his most erudite and enthusiastic ecclesiastic, Feofan Prokopovich, appointed by him as Bishop of Pskov and in effect primate of the Orthodox Church and nominally Vice-President of the Synod, though in reality its director. Prokopovich’s authorship of the book has been questioned, but there is little doubt of his hand in its composition, the use made in it of works from his library and his overall editorial responsibility. 

In December 1722 Peter, having signified his approval, authorised publication and the book appeared in the New Year. It was published in two versions, one in ‘church’ type, the other in the ‘civil’ type introduced by Peter in 1708. The ‘civil’ edition ran to 1,200 copies, about five times the standard print-run for publications in Peter’s Russia and striking evidence of the importance which he attached to the book. 

The print-run was small in comparison to the 13,000 copies printed in 1718 of the manifesto on the removal from the succession of the Tsarevich Alexei and the 35,500 copies of the oath of allegiance to Peter Petrovich. The probable reason for this was Peter’s awareness that the take-up for a politico-religious tract was unlikely to be large; and indeed, three years after publication, only 550 copies had been sold, while 50 copies were distributed free of charge. 

A German translation, Das Recht der Monarchen, was printed in Berlin in 1724 by Ambrosius Haude, official publisher to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. It was distributed in Russia for the use of German officers in the Russian service and German nobility in the newly annexed Baltic provinces. As the foreword states, it sought ‘to disabuse foreigners of their false opinion of our people and to give them reason to think better of us’.      

Peter’s statute on the succession, like his reforms generally, proved unpopular in Russia. As one of his advisers said: ‘The Tsar pushes uphill with a dozen supporters – millions pull downhill.’ Those millions had looked forward to the accession of the Tsarevich Alexei in hope of a relaxation of Peter’s harsh enforcement of modernisation and a rolling-back of his westernising policies, including the abandonment of St Petersburg as capital and a return to Moscow and to more traditional religious and social habits. After the death of the Tsarevich, his supporters transferred their loyalties to his son, Peter Alexeyevich. To them the 1722 statute, which set aside his rights, was deeply unwelcome. The enforcement of the oath of loyalty to it was described by Peter Henry Bruce, a British officer in the Russian army, as ‘the most disagreeable service I ever performed in Russia’. A French minister at St Petersburg advised his government that attachment to the traditional line of succession would outlive whatever measures Peter might take to suppress it. This consideration explains Peter’s determination, through the publication of Pravda Voli Monarshei, to make clear his insistence on the primacy of absolute rule in Russia and on universal compliance with ‘the monarch’s will’ even after his death.               

The expression of views critical of Peter and his measures was criminalised and offenders sought out by his Secret Chancellery. The kind of rebuke to the Tsar by the patriarch familiar in Muscovite Russia and exemplified by such brave spirits as Bishop Stefan Yavorsky, who had upbraided Peter for his marriage to Catherine while his first wife was still alive and called Tsarevich Alexei ‘Russia’s only hope’, was no longer permitted. Peter, now styled ‘Supreme Judge’ of the Orthodox Church in Russia, warned: ‘I am your patriarch.’ Pravda Voli Monarshei signified by implication the complete subjection of Church to state.

Discussion in Pravda Voli Monarshei of political forms of government and alternatives to absolutism drew on Roman law, Byzantine tradition and 17th-century political theory. It was selective and tendentious. Grotius is cited out of context to justify absolute monarchy. The book mentions elective monarchy in the Holy Roman Empire, Poland and elsewhere, but only to reject it and, significantly, it makes no reference to recent political theory or contemporary developments in the West, which set limits on monarchical power: the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England (which Peter knew of from his visit in 1698), the Regency in France after the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the aristocratic Swedish revolution of 1720, which followed Peter’s defeat of Sweden in the Great Northern War. These developments were of particular interest to educated Russians, such as Prince Vasilii Lukich Dolgoruky and Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich Golitsyn. Dolgoruky, Peter’s ambassador to Denmark, France, Poland and Sweden, had a copy of the Swedish constitution of 1720, as did Golitsyn, Governor of Kiev, who translated several works of political theory into Russian, including Locke’s Treatises of Civil Government and Fénelon’s Télémaque and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, with their critique of the absolutism of Louis XIV.          

Pravda Voli Monarshei became even more important as a statement of official ideology and an instrument of mass manipulation after Peter’s death in January 1725. The accession of his widow as Catherine I provoked opposition at St Petersburg in the form of anonymous letters. The ruling cabal, who forestalled the claims of the young Petr Alexeevich by bringing her to power in a palace revolution, claimed that Peter had appointed her his successor by virtue of the 1722 statute, but the evidence for this was ambiguous. For traditionalists, the claims of Peter Alexeyevich remained incontrovertible and Catherine, originally a serving-maid from Livonia, was a foreign usurper. 

That popular murmurings against Catherine had not diminished a year later is clear from two decrees of 1726. In January the ruling cabal, now established as a Supreme Privy Council governing in her name, issued a decree complaining of ‘indecent and hostile words’ directed at Catherine by ‘villains in various cities and districts’. A further decree in April combined three related measures. First, it again denounced the authors of the anonymous letters. Second, it affirmed Catherine’s right to appoint her own successor under the statute of 1722. Finally, it authorised a second edition of Pravda Voli Monarshei, which was duly published in July 1726.  

Originally 1,200 copies were ordered, the same number as for the first edition. It was then decided to publish on a far larger scale: 19,500 copies were printed, 14 times more than for the first edition, 14,000 in ‘church’ type, 5,000 in ‘civil’ type. Order was given for their distribution throughout the empire. The size of the print run was a measure of the seriousness with which the Supreme Privy Council treated criticism of Catherine’s legitimacy, though how far distribution of the book was carried out seems less certain. Fewer than 3,000 copies were sent to the provinces. 

A massive shift also followed in the audience to whose attention the Supreme Privy Council decided to extend the message of the book: from a small literate minority to the wider, largely illiterate, population through the recitation of the book in church. This was authorised to take place in all parish churches and monasteries after mass on Sundays and holy days. The Synod directed that the book be divided into ‘readings’, each one to begin with a brief recapitulation of the previous one.

On Catherine’s death in May 1727, the 11-year-old Peter Alexeyevich, having been named as successor in her will, acceded as Peter II and a manifesto was issued, basing his right to succeed on the statute of 1722. Two months later, however, a shift in the power structure of the ruling elite produced an ideological volte-face. The Supreme Privy Council of eight was now dominated by two legitimist families from the old nobility, the Golitsyns and Dolgorukys, who authorised the formal repudiation both of the 1722 statute and of Pravda Voli Monarshei itself. The statute was duly repealed, succession by right of male primogeniture was reinstated and Peter II’s accession was represented as having taken place by birthright alone. Pravda Voli Monarshei was proscribed. In the words of Thomas Consett, it was ‘called in and forbid to be sold or read in Russia’. Over the next 12 months 14,500 copies were handed in to the authorities to be destroyed.     

A manifesto of October 1727 reaffirmed the traditional doctrine of monarchy by birth and divine right. It ascribed Peter II’s right of succession not to his nomination by Catherine but to his entitlement as ‘the true-born sovereign … granted to us by the King of Kings’. The return of the court to Moscow appeared to presage a return to traditional ways, when the young Tsar died suddenly of smallpox in January 1730. He left no heir. 

This unexpected turn of events offered the Golitsyns and Dolgorukys an opportunity to establish a western-style constitutional monarchy in Russia. The prime movers in this design were Prince Vasilii Lukich Dolgoruky and Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich Golitsyn. Ignoring the claims of Elisabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, they invited his niece, Anna Ivanovna, the widowed Duchess of Courland, to ascend to the throne, provided that she sign a list of ‘conditions’ subjecting her exercise of power in all matters of importance to the consent of the Supreme Privy Council. Anna readily agreed and signed the ‘conditions’ surrendering to the Supreme Privy Council the decisive voice in any marriage she might seek to contract and in the questions of the succession, war and peace, taxation and expenditure. She undertook ‘not to deprive members of the nobility of their life, honour and property without trial’ and promised that ‘if I do not keep any of these promises, I shall be deprived of the Russian crown’.

Russia’s ‘Bill of Rights’, however, proved a nine days’ wonder. The upper ranks of the military, civil and church administration had come to Moscow for the coronation of Peter II. They resented the pretensions of the Golitsyns and Dolgorukys and their stealthy scheme to impose their own restraints on absolute power. Better one autocrat, said Prokopovich, than the tyranny of oligarchs. Anna was persuaded to renounce the conditions she had agreed to and, six weeks after signing them, as if yielding to her subjects’ wishes, she ostentatiously tore them up and was crowned as absolute monarch. The Supreme Privy Council was disbanded. The Golitsyns and Dolgorukys were banished and later liquidated. The 1722 statute was reintroduced and invoked by Anna in the nomination of her successors.

Pravda Voli Monarshei was invested with the force of law and the doctrines laid down in it – the God-given nature of absolute rule, the unlimited authority of the tsars as the embodiment of sovereign power, above the law and unaccountable to their subjects, the people’s duty of unconditional obedience and the denial of their right to a voice in government – resumed their traditional place in the polity of tsarist Russia. Deriving from Muscovite custom and reformulated under Peter the Great in his ‘famous book’, these concepts continued in one way or another to underpin Russia’s imperial history and beyond.

Antony Lentin is a senior member of Wolfson College, Cambridge and was Professor of History at the Open University.