80 Historians have differed in their evaluations of Heinrich Pick and his part in the Petrine administrative reforms. The Russian legal historian E. Berendts, who, because of his sympathies for Slavophile ideas, was unable to assign too much importance to the foreign influence on the establishment of the Russian collegial administration, described Pick as a person whose character was subject to suspicion, and whose various proposals for administrative reforms had not appealed to Peter the Great. One finds an entirely different portrait of Pick in the work of the Swedish historian, Harald Hjärne: Fick is one of the most remarkable statesmen of the eighteenth century. He had an education that was appropriate for a contemporary of Voltaire and Bolingbroke, with a strong touch of their reckless skepticism. He reminds one, at one and the same time, of the bureaucratic Swedish riksdag frondeurs of the period when the estates were sovereign and the high-flying intriguers and administrators of the ducal Orleans regency or the decaying Versailles court, or even of the French Revolution. His historical importance emerges in an increasingly clear light the more research in the opened Russian state archives manages to illuminate what really went on around the ravagers of the realm or the silhouettes on the imperial throne. Hjärne obviously had in mind Pick’s activities in connection with the so-called constitutional crisis of 1730 when he formulated this somewhat exaggerated portrait of the man. However, Hjärne was correct in thinking that Pick had played a much larger role during the Russian reform period than had been realized earlier. That Heinrich Pick was, in fact, intimately involved in the reforms of the Russian central and local administration was demonstrated once and for all by Pavel Miliukov and M. Bogoslovskii. In their fundamental studies of administrative history, they presented a series of documents showing that Pick had provided the organizers of the Russian colleges with materials concerning the Swedish administration and that he had even developed independent suggestions for organizational changes in the Russian administrative apparatus. Miliukov’s and Bogoslovskii’s results were supplemented by A. R. Cederberg, who, on the basis of Pick’s archives in Estonia, was able to show that Pick developed a significant wealth of ideas and considerable power of 168 161) 170 E. Berendts, Baron A. Kh. fon Luberas i ego zapiska ob ustroistve kollegii v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1891), 4. Elsewhere, too, Berendts argues that it would be meaningless to Investigate the material which Pick left behind in various archives; E. Berendts, NeskoVko slov o kollegiiakh Petra Velikogo (laroslavP, 1896), 19. Harald Hjärne, “Svenska reformer i tsar Peters välde,” in idem, Ur del förgängna (Stockholm, 1912), 122—123. See N. Pavlov-Sil’vanskh’s article on Pick in RBS, XXVIII—XXIX, 73—75, which is founded primarily on Miliukov’s study of the Russian state economy. 1«S 169
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=