Absolutism and Modernization: On the Evaluation of the Peter the Great’s Reforms of the Early 18th Century

The article analyzes the contents and social meaning of Peter I’s reforms implemented in the first quarter of the 18th century that became the first large-scale attempt to modernize Russia. The success of the Petrine reforms, apart from the energy and will of the tsar-reformer, was determined by the institutional power of the absolutist state which appeared to be capable to override and make the social aggregate of the traditional Russian society structured in accordance with its purposes. In that sense, it is necessary to consider the absolutism as a standalone phase in the course of the world history characterized by the dramatic increase in the state’s political activity in transforming both the economy and society. In Russia the formation of absolutism developed universally having been accelerated by the patrimonial type of the traditional Russian statehood. In contrast to the Western Europe where the absolutist state’s superstructure had already been significantly underlaid with the capitalist base, Russia had shown during the Peter I’s reforms a certain inversion of the pattern of social transformations – the fact which expressed itself in the attempt to reproduce the achievements of the Western capitalism entirely on the basis of traditional society’s resources. This objectively secured a hypertrophied and, in certain sense, above-class role of the state as initiator and chief actor of the modernizing reforms for the long historical perspective.