27 Northern War, as well as on the legislation of other countries, such as England, the Netherlands, France, and Denmark. According to Troitskii, “native experience” had likewise been decisive in the formulation of the instructions for the kommerts-kollegiia and the kamer-kollegiia}^^ These statements were not, however, based on any source critical analysis of those instructions. In the case of the kamer-kollegiia, for example, an analysis of that type would have shown that the instructions were more a summary of the practices of the comparable Swedish college than a result of “native experience. the Russian krigs-kollegiia was never issued any instructions of its own. Trotskil summarized his interpretation in the following manner: Carrying out the administrative reform, the government of Peter I turned broadly to the experiences of the European countries, including Sweden, but [it] treated them creatively, choosing only that which could be applied to the conditions of the Russian reality, and [it] put a generalization of native legislation and the practices existing in the country in the first place. Against Troitskii’s last statement in this matter, however, one can argue that Peter and his colleagues did not express such a clear awareness as Troitskii would have us believe. A study of the available source materials would instead reveal that there was little agreement between Russian social reality and the actors’ perception of that reality, for the Petrine government decided to introduce a foreign administrative system without really knowing or taking into account whether it was “applicable to the conditions of the Russian reality.” The points made by Troitskii concerning the role played by foreign models in Peter’s reforms are found in more concise form in an essay by Georgii A. Nekrasov published in 1975.^^" As a point of departure for his essay, Nekrasov pointed out that historians have often “reproached Peter for a mechanical transferral of Swedish establishments to Russia, for which reason he intended to clarify just how extensive the borrowing of Swedish administrative forms had been. Nekrasov pointed to the large number of Swedish legal documents in the Soviet archives and stated that it is possible, with their help, to reconstruct in detail the structure of the early eighteenth-century Swedish state administration.^^® However, he did not go into any detail about the source Ibid., 72. See p. 169. Troitskii (1977), 75. G. A. Nekrasov, “Uchrezhdenie kollcgii v Rossii i Shvedskoc zakonodatel’stvo,'’ in V. T. Pashuto et al., cds., Obshchestvo i gosudarstvo feodal’noi Rossii. Sbornik statei V chest’ 70-letiia akademika L. V. Cherepnina [Moscow, 1975), 334—343. ”8 ihid., 334. »» Ibid., 336. Moreover, Troitskii overlooked the fact that ’’ 115 116 118 IIH
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