11 broader dissemination by Voltaire, who made it known through his Histoire de Vempirc russc sous Pierre le Grand that: ~~ La plupart des Loix qu’il (i.e., Peter) porta, furent tirees de celles de la Suede, et il ne fit point de difficulte d’admettre dans les Tribunaux (i.e., colleges) les prisonniers Suedois instruits de la Jurisprudence de leur pays, et qui ayant appris la langue de I’Empire, volurent rester en Russie. The fact that the Swedish colleges had been studied in connection with the Russian collegial reform was made public in Russia, too, at the end of the eighteenth century when, between 1788 and 1797, I. I. Golikov published a multi-volume work on Peter the Great and his regime. This series of volumes consisted, for the most part, of a collection of Petrine archival documents containing a great deal of evidence to the effect that the Russian collegial system had been developed on the basis of Swedish models.-^ Golikov’s work, however, was panegyrical; Peter’s reforms were not subjected to any critical appraisal, but were merely catalogued in order to glorify the memory of the dead tsar. Standing for a long time as the only work on the Petrine period based on extensive archival materials, Golikov’s panegyric became the primary source of documents for Russian historians and publicists interested in the history of Russia during the reign of Peter the Great.-** Critical discussion of the foreign influences on Peter’s reforms was Initiated by Nikolai Karamzin, the historiographer of the realm and Russia’s first major historian. Karamzin brought up the question of Swedish legal influence in Russia during the Petrine period and argued that: Peter the Great loved that which was foreign, but he did not dictate that Swedish laws, for example, should be borrowed without reservation and called Russian, for he knew that the laws of a people must grow out of its own conceptions, customs, practices, and local conditions. In other words, Karamzin’s argument was that while there were indeed foreign influences, and in this case Swedish Influences, on Peter’s reforms, the tsar had been conscious of the fact that models borrowed from abroad had to be adapted to Russian conditions. This became the traditional viewpoint among Russian historians after Karamzin. It was in connection with the emergence of the so-called “state school” {gosudarstvennaia shkola), or legal school, in the middle of the nineteenth Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Histoire de Vempire russc sous Pierre Ic Grund (2 v., Amsterdam, 1761—1764), II, 189. I. I. Golikov, Deianiia Petra Velikogo, mudrogo prcobrazitclia Rossii, sobrannykh iz dostovernykh Istochnikov i raspolezhennykh po godam (12 v., Moscow, 1788—1789). Idem, Dopolneniia k deianiiam Petra Velikogo (18 v., Moscow, 1790—1797). -® B. I. Syromiatnikov, "Reguliarnoe” gosudarstvo Petra Pervogo i ego ideologiia (Moscow & Leningrad, 1943), 18, 154. N. M. Karamzin, Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1914), 106—107. 30
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