125 us that during his sojourn in Sweden he was charged with the task of ‘'inviting one civil servant from each college to enter the service of His Tsarist Majesty,” but there is reason to doubt that he ever carried out this assignment. First of all, the source in question is very biased since, in the particular context in which he wrote it. Pick wished to emphasize all the great services he had performed for the tsar and the empire. It is understandable that he might have exaggerated his own importance in that situation. Secondly, it would have been much too risky for Pick to contact Swedish civil servants in the central administrative colleges in order to entice them into the service of the tsar. Not only that, but such an assignment would seem unlikely in view of the fact that the real nature of Pick’s trip was to be kept secret. Had Pick, as a Russian agent, been caught by the Swedes in pursuing such an intention he would undoubtedly have been accused of, and tried for, espionage. Having completed successfully his task of collecting information about the Swedish administrative system in Stockholm, Pick was sent to Germany to recruit staff for the Russian colleges. In connection with Pick’s imminent trip, Peter wrote to General Weyde from Amsterdam in January 1717 that “it will be sufficient [to have] two assessors in each college, and also inform [Pick] that he is now to go to Silesia in order to seek such persons as are necessary for the scrivener tasks, since I hope that he can find a sufficient number of such persons there, and especially that he look for those who can at least speak Polish or Slavic {Hi po slovenski)” On this trip, which lasted until the autumn of 1717, Pick visited several German cities, including Hamburg and Berlin. We have no precise information about how many foreigners entered Russian service thanks to Pick’s efforts, since the available materials only reveal two individuals who are explicitly reported to have signed service contracts with Heinrich Pick, namely Heinrich Schlatter, a Swiss who was given the position of assessor in the berg- i manufaktur-kollegiia, and Johann Levin, a Brandenburger who was appointed as a clerk in the same college. Both men had met Pick in Berlin.There is, however, reason to suppose that Pick succeeded in convincing a much larger number of men to accept the tsar’s offer of work in the Russian colleges.:u!» TsGADA, f. 248 delo 654 1. 76. TsGADA, f. 248 delo 111. 40. TsGADA, f. 248 delo 654 11. Ill —112. The secretary of the kamer-koltegiia, Stefan Kochius, was also sent out to look for personnel for the colleges, specifically to Königsberg; TsGADA, f. 9 otdelenie 2 delo 37 1. 712. The same t.ask had been assigned to von Luberas, who reported that he had succeeded in recruiting 148 persons willing to join the Russian service; Miliukov (1905), 428. Cederberg, 23; Miliukov (1905), 439 note 2. :uu
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