400 only of officers and sailors, but also of judicial, economic, construction, artillery, religious, medical, and several (other) staffs.” This large organization devoured enormous amounts of money, most of which went to pay its civilian and military employees. Charles XI’s naval policy was to build a fleet superior to that of Denmark, and great economic resources were placed at the disposition of the amiralitetskollegium in pursuit of this goal. By the outbreak of the Great Northern War, the Swedish navy was, in terms of the numbers of vessels at its disposal, the most powerful naval force in the Baltic.-^ No Russian fleet of any significance was to make an appearance in these waters until after 1709. The Swedes had not taken the Russian naval construction program very seriously, but the Russlan navy was so strong by the time Denmark declared war on Sweden in 1709 that it took a large part of the Swedish navy to keep the Russian ships bottled up in the Gulf of Finland.-- The position of the amiralitetskollegium was weakened after Charles XITs return to Sweden in 1716, for the king himself assumed practically all direction of naval operations.-^ The krigs-kollegiia 1. The only archival materials concerning the genesis of the Russian krigskollegiia that have been available for this study have been a few personnel and salary budgets drawn up between 1718 and 1720. While these documents cannot, of course, tell us anything about the discussions held in connection with the founding of the college, they do give us an idea of how the organizers of the college envisioned their personnel needs. The president of the krigs-kollegiia. General Adam Weyde,-^ submitted a proposal for the staffing of the college to the Senate in May of 1718. Along with this proposal, Weyde submitted a Russian translation of the personnel budget for the Swedish krigskollegium, thus bearing witness to the fact that the krigs-kollegiia, like the other colleges, had been instructed to study its Swedish counterpart as a model for its own organizational efforts. Nonetheless, Weyde’s proposal for an organizational structure differed from that of the krigskollegium, as is clear from the following comparison: Ibid., 156. Ibid., 13, 18, 27. -- Ibid., 94. Ibid., 156. Concerning Weyde, see above, p. 70. “ TsGADA, f. 248 delo 42 11. 287—289.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=