402 to have become stabilized right away, for a source later in 1719 informs us that “the college of war has not yet been brought into complete order.” 2» According to a personnel budget dating from 1720, the staff of the krigs-kollegiia, including the president, numbered sixty-eight, of whom four were foreigners. Vice President Adam Weyde did not appear in this budget, since he had died earlier that year.^^ The president of the college was Prince Aleksandr Menshikov, who had emerged as Peter’s special favorite by the end of the 1680s.^“ After the tsar himself, he was Russia’s most powerful man, and between 1725, when Peter died, and 1727, when he fell from power, Menshikov was the actual ruler of the country. Primarily through donations from the tsar, Menshikov had succeded in assembling a collection of estates second in size only to that of Peter himself.^^ Taking advantage of his position in order to improve his personal economy, however, Menshikov misused his power so often that Peter finally deprived him of the presidency of the krigs-kollegiia in 1723.22. The admiralteiskaia kollegiia 2.1. Organization and Personnel In his “Berättelse om Ryssland,” the Swedish minister at St.Petersburg, Herman Cedercreutz, claimed that the Russian admiralty college had been modeled on the Swedish amiralitetskollegium,^'^ but we do not know to what extent this may have been the case. It has not been possible to determine what the plans were for setting up the admiralteiskaia kollegiia in the initial stages of the collegial reform, or to determine how those plans were pursued. The source materials available for this study of the genesis of the admiralteiskaia kollegiia have been more substantial than were those available for the study of the krigs-kollegiia, but they have nonetheless been much too fragmentary to enable us to take anything but a TsGADA, f. 248 delo 656 11. 353—353v. TsGADA, f. 248 delo 606 11. 208—208v. Changes had also taken place among the college’s foreign staff members since 1719. Among other things, Anton von Schlippenbach was no longer listed in the collegial budget for 1720; see above, p. 133. N. UsTRiALOV, Istoriia tsarstvovaniia Petra Vetikogo (5 v., St. Petersburg, 1858— 1863), IV: 1, 207—218. ** S. M. Troitskii, “Khoziaistvo krupnogo sanovnika Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII V.,” in N. I. Pavlenko et al., eds., Rossiia v period reform Petra I (Muscow, 1973), 218. 28 Ibid., 225—226. See above, p. 138.
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