The Noble Cadet Corps and the “Germans,” 1730s

This chapter explores the establishment of the Noble Land Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg (1731), the most important educational institution for the nobility in Russia in the eighteenth century, in the context of court politics of the era. The creation of a military school and its design might be expected to naturally follow from the needs of the army. Instead, the chapter demonstrates that the Corps served as instrument for the self-promotion efforts of its ambitious founder, Field Marshal von Münnich, and that it is due to his unique standing at the court that the school enjoyed imperial patronage and received funding on a scale unimaginable under Peter I. Once established, the Corps became a platform for the enterprising efforts of its faculty and staff and, insofar as these were recruited largely through the Pietists networks, also for their pedagogical experiments that defined the educational profile of this elite school.

Introduction

The Introduction defines the notion of “administrative entrepreneurship” and outlines the role the “administrative entrepreneurs” played in building the infrastructure of the early modern state, including schools. Recent historiography has tended to question the traditional image of the “absolutist” state as a powerful unified actor, stressing instead the limits of the rulers’ actual power, the role of social compromises, and the pervasiveness of unofficial clans and patronage networks that structured early modern politics in Europe and elsewhere. Scholars also emphasize the premodern, patrimonial character of bureaucracy in that era. Against this backdrop, the Introduction argues that it might have been the self-seeking projectors who drove the invention and expansion of the state as they strove to invent jobs for themselves and to promote their agendas. The chapter introduces three types of “administrative entrepreneurs”—the “experts,” the “ministers,” and the “functionaries”—and outlines their respective modes of operation.

Conclusion

The Conclusion sets the broader context for the key episodes of innovation driven by projectors that have been the subjects of the preceding chapters. It explores the role of diverse enterprisers in the evolution of schools in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century and later. These enterprisers included numerous private teachers, who dominated the educational landscape in Russia well into the nineteenth century, and diverse officials who promoted their personal projects from within the emerging educational bureaucracy. Contrary to the pervasive myth that the “state” has always been and still is the only player in education in Russia, similar dynamics, to some extent, are observed also in the twentieth century and today.

The Naval Schools and Peter I’s Grand Regulations, 1710s–1730s

Among our best sources for understanding Peter I’s own take on development of formal schools in Russia are the grand naval regulations, or reglaments, that he himself drafted and edited. A detailed reconstruction of Peter’s personal contribution to the relevant passages in these documents demonstrates that the tsar focused almost exclusively on practical training of naval officers and on prescribing their modes of service. By contrast, he did not feel a need to comprehensively regulate the operations of schools and their curricula, or to codify and delineate the duties of the teachers and administrators. In the absence of a drive to regulate on the ruler’s part, the rationalization and formalization of schooling was often animated by the pragmatic concerns of individual officials and teachers, such as Leontii Magnitskii, the teacher of mathematics and later the head of the Navigation School. These enterprisers drafted regulations and requested instructions from their superiors insofar as it helped them to define and protect their status or to shield themselves from potential blame.

The Naval Academy and the “Impostor Baron without Any Diploma”

The key role in setting up the first “well-regulated” school of Peter I’s era, the Naval Academy in St Petersburg (1715), belongs, it turns out, to an impostor. The first proposal for the Academy was presented to Peter I by the so-called baron de Saint-Hilaire, who also drafted its regulations and became its first director, and who has also been assumed to be an experienced French naval expert. As the chapter demonstrates, however, Saint-Hilaire, in fact, was a complete fraud, an international adventurer, and a swindler. Nevertheless, he successfully acted as the head of the school for over a year and introduced to Russia a new administrative role, that of a school director appointed purely to manage teaching, rather than to teach himself. While the baron himself was soon dismissed, this administrative role was claimed by his successors from among the Russian elite. The story of Saint-Hilaire stresses the ambiguity of expertise in the early modern era.

Monks, Masters, and Missionaries

This chapter offers an overview of the development of schools in Muscovy in the seventieth century, as well as Peter I’s own views on education and schooling. It argues that rather than in schools, instruction during this period was largely conducted in the form of traditional teachership: teaching “masters” trained the pupils gathering around them in the same way as masters-artisans instructed their own apprentices. Contrary to the received wisdom, the early proposals to establish more institutionalized schools did not come from the state and, in fact, were met with indifference by Muscovy’s rulers. Rather, the introduction of such schools was driven by a variety of enterprising individuals—first, the Greek and Ukrainian monks, and later on by the Jesuits and the Pietists, among others. Peter I himself, however, shared the traditional understanding of schools as informal workshops run by individual “masters,” and of learning as apprenticeship.

The Fops, the Favorites, and Other Reformers of the Service Schools, 1740s–1760s

The evolution of schools in the 1740s–1750s, just as in earlier periods, was driven primarily by the ambitions and political agendas of enterprising officials, rather than by any abstract “state policy.” This chapter focuses on the transformation of the Naval Academy and the Navigation School, amalgamated in the early 1750s into a Naval Cadet Corps, and on the attempts to reforms the technical schools. The latter are set in the context of the projecting efforts of the Shuvalov cousins: Ivan, the favorite of Empress Elizabeth, and Petr, the head of the artillery and one of the leaders of the government in the 1750s.

The Navigation School and the “Profit-Maker”

This chapter surveys the early history of the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation, one of the most notable educational projects of Peter I’s reign. The school is famous for its secular, mathematics-oriented curriculum and for the role played in its establishment by the tsar himself, who personally hired the first teachers for it in England. Upon closer inspection, however, it turns out that the evidence of the tsar’s direct involvement in the design, establishment, or running of the Navigation School is extremely limited. The documents, however, bear witness to the key role played in shaping the school by Aleksei Kurbatov (1663–1721), a notorious “profit-maker,” that is, an “inventor” of new revenue sources for the treasury. As the chapter demonstrates, Kurbatov used this project to harness resources and administrative opportunities for himself, as well as to support his own circle of clients, drawn from the ranks of Moscow’s “Latinizing” literati.