RB 29

18 the existing Muscovite arbitrariness and the planless manner of dealing with cases.” In a later essay, Hjärne showed that he had been influenced by Miliukov’s views. Here Hjärne stated, in contrast to his earlier essay, that the “outward Europeanization” of the Russian state did not follow any plan, but that it is actually explained “by the linking together of Russian financial distress and the brutal tightening of absolute power under ostensibly Western forms.” In this statement, we recognize Miliukov’s thesis about the planless implementation of the reforms under the pressure of the rising costs of the war. At the end of the nineteenth century, the legal historian Eduard Berendts emerged as a vocal critic of the widespread view among Russian historians that Peter the Great’s later administrative reforms were consciously carried out according to Swedish models. Berendts had previously published a large work on the Swedish state economy, which, although the work was not at all original in its historical aspects, gave him the stature of an authority on the development of the Swedish administrative system. In his essays on the Petrine administrative reforms, Berendts assumed the task of defending the tsar against the accusation of slavishly imitating Sweden, a reproach which he felt remained as “a spot on the memory of Peter.” 6» Berendts argued that the collegial reform was carried out in order to secure compliance with the law.'^° This aim could only be achieved, according to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas, with the help of a collegial organization of the state administration. Nor were colleges anything new to Russia; in Berendts’ view the collegial reform merely constituted a continuation of an old Russian tradition. He argued that he could prove the existence of collegiality in Russia from the institutions of the prince and his druzhina back in the Middle Ages right up through the Duma and the prikaz administration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And what was the Russian peasant collective {mir) 68 Ibid., loc.cit. Harald Hjärne, “Svenska reformer i tsar Peters välde,” in idem, Ur del förgångna (Stockholm, 1912), 123. Other essays by Harald Hjärne which concern the Russian administrative reforms and their reliance on Swedish administrative principles are “Ryssland under nordiska krigets återverkan” in Nordisk tidskrift för vetenskap, konst och industri (1892) and an unpublished essay entitled “De svenska kollegiernas efterbildning i Ryssland under tsar Peters regering,” uncatalogued, Harald Hjärnes samling, UUB. E. Berendts, Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo Shvetsii (2 v.. St. Petersburg, 1890— 68 1894). ®® Idem, Neskol’ko slov o kollegiiakh Petra Velikogo (laroslavP, 1896), 6. ■» Ibid., 8.

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