23 This sort of methodological concentration would provide the 93 statutes. question with a deeper dimension, since the socio-economic development of society would be joined together with its legal expressions. For obvious reasons, Man’kov was unable to followup such an ambitious program of research in a short essay, but by putting the collected documents of the commission on the law in this light he pointed the way for further research in the areas of legislative and administrative history. Man’kov stated that Swedish law had constituted the principle source for the formulation of the legal code drafted by the commission on the law. Loans from Swedish law were especially prevalent in the area of procedural law, while less striking influence is noticeable in the sections of the draft code concerning real estate law. Those parts of the draft code dealing with the peasant population and with serfdom lack any references to Swedish law, and, according to Man’kov, this fact shows that the commission remained “strictly critical” toward the Swedish materials.”^ Man’kov claimed that, in its socio-economic development, Sweden occupied a middle ground between the backward, feudal Russia and such economically advanced countries as England and Holland,^® and that Sweden was therefore perceived by Peter and his colleagues as being less foreign than were those other European countries. Moreover, Sweden had an absolutist form of government with a highly developed administrative system. In Man’kov’s view, the socio-economic and political conditions under which the Swedish state apparatus operated conformed to a great extent with the goals of the Russian reformists, and this explains why “Peter contemplated borrowing the most heavily from the Swedish systems of administration and legislation. In 1973, the Soviet legal historians K. A. Sofronenko and L. A. Steshenko published a book presenting a survey of the constitutional and administrative changes, which characterized the Russian state apparatus during the first decades of the eighteenth century.**^ The reforms carried out during ” 96 *- A. G. Man’kov, “Ispol’zovanie v Rossii shvedskogo zakonodatcl’stva pri sostavlcnii proekta ulozhcniia 1720—1725 gg.,” Trudy Leningradskogo otdelcniia instituta istorii AN SSSR, no. 11 (1970), 112—126. For another essay on the same topic, see idem, “Proekt Ulozheniia Rossiiskogo gosiidarstva 1720—1725 gg.,” in S. L. Peshtich et al., cds., Problemy feodaVnoi Rossii. Sbornik statei k 60-letiiu professors V. V. Mavrodina (Leningrad, 1971), 157—166. Man’kov (1970), 114. Ibid., 126. Man’kov got the idea for this thesis from the Soviet Scandinavianist Aleksandr S. Kan, “Dve tendentsii v dvorianskom khoziaistve Shvetsii XVII v.,” Voprosy istorii, no. 3 (1954). ''® Man’kov (1970), 118—119. L. A. Steshenko & K. A. Sofronenko, Gosudarstvennyi stroi Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII v. (Moscow, 1973).
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