Every nobleman while he lived must serve the state, and he held his fief only upon condition of such service; while a nobleman who could not read or write in a foreign tongue forfeited his birthright.

This was the way Peter fought idleness and ignorance in his land! New and freer municipal organizations were given to the cities, enlarging the privileges of the citizens; schools and colleges were established; the awful punishment for debtors swept away.

He was leveling up as well as leveling down--trying to create a great plateau of modern society, in which he alone towered high, rigid, and inexorable.
If the attempt was impossible and against nature, if Peter violated every law of social development by such a monstrous creation of a modern state, what could have been done better?
How long would it have taken Russia to _grow_ into modern civilization?
And what would it be now if there had not been just such a strange being--with the nature and heart of a barbarian joined with a brain and an intelligence the peer of any in Europe, capable of seeing that the only hope for Russia was by force to convert it from an Asiatic into a European state?
One act bore with extreme severity upon the free peasantry.

They were compelled to enroll themselves with the serfs in their Communes, or to be dealt with as vagrants.

Peter has been censured for this and also for not extending his reforming broom to the Communes and overthrowing the whole patriarchal system under which they existed--a system so out of harmony with the modern state he was creating.