411 as a result of the author’s uneven access to Russian archival materials. For this reason, the study of the organization of the new fiscal administration has been the most thorough, while the extremely limited access to materials concerning the central organs of the military administration has reduced the treatment of the krigs-kollegiia and the admiralteiskaia kollegiia to a bare minimum. This study has employed a comparative method involving the comparison of the Russian administrative organs with their Swedish counterparts in terms of organization and responsibilities. Here the goal has not been to trace verbal agreement between the Swedish and Russian legislative documents; such a goal would not have provided sufficient material for solving the task at hand, since the activities of some Swedish administrative organs were not completely regulated by, or described in, any legislative acts. In cases such as those of the kamer-kollegiia and the shtatskontor-kollegiia, therefore, it has been necessary to reconstruct the operating procedures of the comparable Swedish colleges in order to obtain relevant comparative materials for the Russian collegial instructions. The working hypothesis in these cases has been that the Russian legislative documents involved, such as the instructions for the kamer-kollegiia and the shtats-kontor-kollegiia, were drawn up on the basis of descriptions of the actual operations of the comparable Swedish colleges provided by someone who had had an opportunity to study the activities of the Swedish administration at close hand. The results of the present study can be summarized in the following manner. Plans for reorganizing the Russian state administration by means of a comprehensive reform first took form in 1714. It was clear from the very beginning that the Swedish administrative structure was viewed as a suitable model for such a reform. The man who took the initial steps and who later emerged as the driving force behind the reforms was Tsar Peter, himself. He not only issued directives concerning the measures to be taken, but also participated in drawing up the legislative acts concerning the new administrative organs. Knowledge of the Swedish administration was provided by a German named Heinrich Pick, who had previously served the Swedish crown and whom Peter had sent to Stockholm in 1716 to study the Swedish colleges at first hand. On his return to St. Petersburg, Pick had with him printed or manuscript copies of a very large number of Swedish legislative acts, and his role in the planning and implementation of the Russian administrative reforms can hardly be exaggerated. Soviet historians have described Pick’s part in the reforms as that of a passive instrument for the tsar and his collaborators. In sharp contrast to this portrayal, the present study has clearly demonstrated that Pick not only supplied the tsar and the Senate with correct information about
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