Army and Administration
Army and Administration
This chapter examines reforms of army and administration across the eighteenth century. Under Peter I and his successors Russia’s navy expanded from virtually nothing to a fleet that defeated Sweden in the first decade of the century and the Ottoman navy by the 1760s; the infantry army and its officer corps greatly accelerated a seventeenth-century process of modernization and expansion along European standards; by mid-century it was the largest in Europe. On the southern borders, however, a garrison army oriented to steppe warfare was maintained. Social impact was great: the new annual capitation tax and military recruitment imposed on the Eeast Slavic peasantry were onerous; military reform, as well as Petrine cultural reforms, transformed the Muscovite elite into a European nobility; new taxation and imperial-scale mobilization required vast expansion of the bureaucracy and some modernization of its techniques. Catherine II’s territorial re-division of the realm and administrative, fiscal, and judicial reforms of 1775 rationalized administration across the realm, while Paul I instituted reforms to professionalize the civil service.
Keywords: military, navy, recruitment, taxation, bureaucracy, civil service, Catherine II, Peter I, Paul I, judicial reform
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