ABSTRACT
Historians of Russia have been kind to neither the reign nor the personality of Peter III. The descriptions of Peter as a man are usually based on the portrait sketched by his wife, Catherine II, who had good reason to make him appear as ridiculous and unappealing as possible. This chapter summarizes the most important measures of domestic policy on the basis of unpublished records of the senate and the few remnants of Peter's official correspondence. The best known of all of Peter III's legislative acts was the so-called "Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility," dated February 18, 1762, which put an end to the compulsory nature of the nobility's state service, without, however, encouraging noblemen to take advantage of their new "freedom." The police organization of Imperial Russia had its beginnings in the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz, established by Peter I. In the eighteenth century it relied heavily on denunciations as an effective weapon of wide-ranging terror.
