HSE Publishing House

One of Peter I’s most seminal reforms was the creation of “collegia”, government agencies of a new type, a step that marked a radical restructuring of state administration in Russia. For the first time, this book presents the full texts of documents that mapped out an alternative model for this reform that has not been implemented. This set of projects for the organization of collegia and other administrative bodies was prepared on the basis of Western European models, on Peter I’s orders, by one of the tsar’s foreign advisers, Baron Anania Christian Pott von Luberas. These documents reflect the diversity of potential trajectories of reform and help us to better understand the version of it that was eventually chosen and implemented by the monarch.