28 materials to which he was referring, and he was therefore unable to place them in correct relationship to the Russian administrative reforms. But this did not prevent him from stating categorically that “Peter and his associates, taking into account the Swedish pattern, applied it critically and creatively, borrowing that which was acceptable and useful for Russian conditions.” Nekrasov was careful to emphasize that the use of Swedish models was characterized through and through by what he called “creative reworking” (tvorcheskaia pererahotka)S~^ He was unable to show just how this “creative reworking” actually functioned, since he had not studied the Swedish and Russian sources mentioned in his essay in any detail. According to Nekrasov, Peter preferred the Swedish type of college because it best answered the needs of the emerging Russian absolutism. Moreover, the choice of the Swedish administrative system as a model was quite logical in view of the fact that there were “certain common, coincidental features” in the socio-economic development of the two countries.*"' The position of Soviet historiography on the extent to which the Russian collegial reforms were dependent upon foreign, and especially Swedish, models may be summarized in the following manner. Peter and his assoclates collected an extensive amount of detailed information about the administrative systems of many different Western European countries. After very careful study, the Swedish model was selected because Sweden, more than any other country, resembled Russia in terms of socio-economic and political development. The tsar and his advisers did not, however, borrow the Swedish administrative principles in their entirety; instead, they made use of the Swedish “experiences” after “a critical and creative reworking.” If one makes an exception for Man’kov’s essays on Russian attempts to formulate a legal code in the 1720s, Soviet historians who have studied the collegial reform and its foreign models, and especially S. M. Troitskii and G. A. Nekrasov, have not supported their arguments with any source critical studies based on the secondary literature and the study of significant amounts of printed and manuscript sources of a primary nature. Nekrasov, for example, rejected Miliukov’s findings, saying that “he spoke of a mechanical loan of foreign institutional forms,” which according to Nekrasov was “an accusation” against Peter.Instead, Nekrasov considered Berendts a more reliable authority. Thus, the opinions of the Soviet historians mentioned here resemble very much the conceptions Ihid., 340. Ihid., 334, 343. Ihid., 343. »23 Ihid., 334. 120
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