405 He was named admiral and commander of the Baltic fleet in 1707 and personally led the Russian naval forces in their efforts against the Swedesd* 2.2. The instructions for the admiralteiskaia kollegiia The instructions for the admiralteiskaia kollegiia, or Reglament o upravlenii Admiralteistva i verfi, promulgated on April 5, 1722, constitutes one of the most extensive legislative acts of the Petrine period.■*- With its more than four hundred articles, it provided comprehensive guidance for the college’s various officials in the performance of their respective duties. The instructions for the admiralty are by far the most detailed, and thus the most informative, of all the Russian collegial instructions. It is not possible here to determine exactly what method and which sources were used in the formulation of these instructions, since it has not been possible to study any of the drafts of this document. The available sources do, however, allow one to make more or less certain assumptions about how this legislative work was conducted and about what materials were employed. In December 1720, Peter issued an ukaz with the following directives to the commission charged with drawing up the instructions for the admiralteiskaia kollegiia'. Put together from all the regulations the points concerning each position, as is proper. The method the tsar described here in such a laconic manner involved making comparisons of the foreign legislative acts chosen as sources and then choosing the passages fromthose acts which best suited the intentions of the Russian legislators. This method was not new in the development of Russian legislative acts; it had been used, for example, in the drawing up of the Military Regulation, or Voinskii ustav, of 1716, where Charles XI’s military articles served as a point of departure and were reworked with the help of materials from other models."** The same method had also been used in drawing up the Naval Regulation, or Morskoi ustav, of 1720, and it has been possible to reconstruct its application in this case with the help of relevant Russian archival sources.*^ Special attention should be paid to the formulation of the Naval Regulation in view of RBS, II, 256—258. PS2, VI, no. 3,937, pp. 525—637. ZA (no. 96), 87. See above, p. 337. Claes Peterson, “Der Morskoi Ustav Peters des Grossen. Ein Beitrag zu seiner Entstehungsgeschichte,” Jahrbucher fiir Geschichte Östeuropas, Neue Folge, 24 (1976), 345—356.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=