31 for this Russian reform.The lower one goes in the administrative structure, the less chance there is for a successful transferral of foreign institutions. The differences between the two countries could not be bridged. Summarizing her findings, von Puttkamer wrote that: was Peter der Grosse in erster Linie an Schweden interessierte, war das Gesamtbild der absoluten Staatsform, die straffe, bis in die unterste Instanz durchdringende Zentralgewalt, wie sie insbesondere Karl XI. in Schweden errichtet hatte und die er nun in kriegerischer Auseinandersetzung uberwinden musste. Against the background of this historiographical survey, it is nowpossible to state the direction of research that has guided the present study. One of its hypotheses is that the reform of the Russian central and local administrative systems were very much dependent upon Swedish models, while hardly any attention at all was paid to the administrative systems of other countries. This problem has, as we have seen, a long tradition in Russian historiography, and it has sometimes been the subject of sharp differences of opinion. Liberal, Western-oriented historians such as A. D. Gradovskii and Pavel Miliukov claimed that Peter the Great’s administrative reforms recreated to a large extent the Swedish administrative system and its practices, while the conservative, chauvinistic legal historian E. Berendts denied that Swedish administrative law played any significant role in the Russian reform activities. Except for Miliukov’s economic history, however, there has been no serious attempt to approach the problem from all sides using a comparative textual analysis of the relevant legal documents. In the works on the Petrine administrative reforms published recently in the Soviet Union, one sees a tendency to ignore Miliukov’s observations based on his study of the sources, and to follow Berendts’ entirely unsubstantiated opinions. The task here, therefore, is to determine the extent and character of Swedish legal influence on the Petrine administrative reforms with the help of a comparative analytical method and on the basis of a broader group of source materials than has been employed in previous studies. In the process, it should become clear whether there is any basis for Troitskii’s and Nekrasov’s thesis that the reception of Swedish administrative forms in various areas was characterized by what they call “a creative reworking,” that is, by a conscious selection of that which could be adapted to Russian conditions and a complete reworking of the selected administrative principles, or whether it is possible to demonstrate greater dependence on the Swedish models. It must be emphasized, however, that the question of reception cannot 134 Ibid., 381. It schould be pointed out that the author does not mention the works by Miliukov and Bogoslovskii. Ibid., 384.
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