Welcome to a slap shot episode of the Russian rulers podcast.

Today's episode is on something that I hadn't discussed regarding Peter the Great.

One of the great reforms that he did or reforms may not be great in some people's eyes,

but was something called the table of ranks of all grades, military, administrative, and court.

What this did is it tried to get rid of the Boyar system, which was just hereditary in many instances,

and give a table of ranks so you can kind of meet each person's

definition of nobility. So if a person was say a rear admiral in the Navy how would that match up to somebody in the Army?

Well, according to Peter, it would be a Major General.

And if he was in the civil service, this is similar to somebody who's a high state

counselor or a president of the colleges.

So what he did is he had these ranks for the three different areas, the Navy, the Army, and the

civil, and try to see where the people were based on their abilities.

What I want to read is some of the things from the table of ranks and how they developed it

and what they wrote about it and what some of the penalties

for not following this were.

This comes from reinterpreting Russian history, which was compiled and edited by Daniel

Kaiser and Gary Marker. This is about the readings in Russia from

860 to the 1860s. To the table of ranks enumerated here we add the

following points which explain how one is obliged to act within

each rank.

Of course here we're not going to go through every one of them, but what we're going to do is just

bits and pieces that they had translated.

...