RB 29

66 There is no doubt about the fact that Miliukov was on the right track concerning the authorship of the memorandum. The following comparison between the memorandum discussed above and a later memorandum, which Pick wrote after he entered Russian service, supports the correctness of Miliukov’s assumption: Memorandum And since for the previously mentioned colleges, as to the other civil and military positions, many skillful and trained people are needed, and it is more useful to the Great monarch always to be able to take all such worthy persons from among his own subjects; the best means for this is that Your Tsarist Majesty please to establish an Academy for your noble youth . . . and with such academies there even follows the advantage . . . that the money which would be spent in foreign countries remains in your own country. The parallels between these two memoranda make it likely that the same person wrote both texts, namely, Heinrich Pick. Pick had once been in Swedish service, and prior to 1715 had visited Stockholm several times. This had given him an opportunity to familiarize himself with the general characteristics of the Swedish collegial administration, if not with its details. But, as we have seen, Miliukov concluded that Pick could not have been the author of the memorandum in question, since it had been written long before the Russians had had any contact with Pick. Here Miliukov relied on the information provided by P. P. Pekarskii, who, in his history of the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences, stated that the first contact with Pick was established in November 1715, or eight months after the memorandum’s terminus ante quern. However, if one carefully examines the source referred to by Pekarskii —a letter to Peter from General Adam Weyde dated Gustrow (in MeekMemorandum7/:"® Wegen Erziehung der Russischen vornehmen und geringen Jugendt, was ihren ersten Grund zu Hausse so wohl, als an andern Grund auf Scheulen und Academien, und den Dritten Grund auff ihren Reisen betrifft, und wie Sie solchergestalt ohne so viel Geld ausserhalb Reiches zu verzehren, Stuffenweise in der Fähigkeit bebracht werden können, dass Ihro Majtt: in kurtzen Jahren alle Ambter in alien Ständen, mit geschickten eingebohrenen LandesKindern wiirdigl. besetzen können. 120 “8 ZA (no. 331), 275. A. R. Cederberg, Heinrich Pick. Pin Beitrag zur russischen Geschichte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts (Dorpat/Tartu, 1930), Beilage 4, 103. See p. 71. Pick’s biographer was also prepared to recognize Pick’s authorship of the memorandum; Cederberg, 12. Although he did not question the validity of Pekarskii’s Information concerning the point In time when contact was first made with Pick, Cederberg did raise the question as to whether Miliukov had perhaps made a mistake in dating the memorandum. 120

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