SUMMARY:

The subject of the article is the Russian Guards (Preobrazhenskii and Semenovskii regiments) at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century as a case study in the continuity of tradition.
During Peter I’s reign, the Russian Guards became a grouping of a handful of people who were given the right to hold individual and independent views on any matter of governmental or other importance due to the significant role they played in the state system of the Russian Empire. It’s hard to find a branch of the economy or politics where the guardsmen did not play some role. Some were obliged to perform police duties, while others controlled the construction of St. Petersburg, governed the occupied territories, censored the activity of imperial institutions (the Senate, the Holy Synod, the Admiralty) as well as assisted powerful individuals such as Prince Menshikov, Field-Marshal Sheremetev, and Admiral Apraksin. Both 18th century society and contemporary historiography have considered the Guards to be, on the one hand, a unique group of the Emperor’s supporters and, on the other, a corporation that tended to reject and destroy so-called “Russian traditional culture”. Yet, the analysis of this aggressive elite body shows that tradition as such was not forgotten as the Guards were formed on the basis of wide-reaching networks of family relations. Kinship was the unit of inner support that led to the emergence of a spirit of companionship and corporate state of collective consciousness. This, in turn, helped the Guards to accept the reformist attitudes and to become the means by which reform was promoted.