19 if not a collegial association? According to Berendts, this reform merely involved a reincarnation of inherited administrative traditions in “foreign garb.” The colleges were a continuation of the old Muscovite chancelleries, the so-called prikazy.’- In contrast to this, Berendts posed what he labeled the unfounded claim that the Swedish administration had served as the direct model for the Russian reforms of the central and local administration. By arbitrarily stringing together a series of different citations from various documents, Berendts attempted to prove that the Russian collegial organization was not based on the Swedish administrative system. Charles XT’s colleges had, of course, served as one of the points of departure—this was a fact the author was unable to ignore, since it was repeated again and again in the tsar’s ukazes—but their influence was only formal in nature. Without examining the content of the Russian collegial instructions, Berendts concluded that the claimthat these instructions were drawn up in accordance with Swedish models was only “a fable and a fabrication.” Instead, the instructions had, in his view, been formulated on the basis of Swedish, Prussian, and Danish texts, but did not coincide in content with any of these foreign sources. According to Berendts, the Russian instructions were entirely Independent pieces of legislation."^ Berendts himself finally provided the explanation for his stubborn claims about the independence of the Petrine reforms in relation to foreign models by supporting, in one of his essays, the interpretation of Peter put forth by the Slavophile Aleksei S. Khomiakov.^'^ Unlike other Slavophiles, Khomiakov recognized the importance of Peter’s reforms,'^® which he considered genuinely Russian, and thus uninfluenced by foreign models.^® Obviously, then, Berendts was incapable of accepting the idea that the important Russian reforms had been carried out on the basis of foreign models; that the sources contradicted his conclusions did not deter him. Instead, he attempted to adapt the information in the sources to his own Slavophile standpoint, but he could do so only by entirely ignoring the results of contemporary historical research. Berendts only made mention of Miliukov, for example, when he argued against Miliukov’s thesis that, already by 1715, the tsar had become interested in, and had even decided to use, the Swedish administrative system as a model Ibid., 9. E. Berendts, Baron A. Kh. fon Liuberas i ego zapiska ob ustroistve kollegii v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1891), 4. E. Berendts, Opyt sistemy administrativnogo prava (laroslavl’, 1898), 102. Berendts (1896), 6. Rubinshtein, 283. "® A. S. Khomiakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, (2nd ed., 2 v., Moscow, 1878), I, 375.
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