A decree allegedly issued by the first Russian emperor condemning trade in natural resources and calling for the introduction of strict rules is popular on the Internet. We have verified the authenticity of such publications.

Usually the wording of the decree, which is disseminated by Internet users, sounds like this: “Trade in the subsoil of the earth is a primordial business of thieves, and therefore the salary they should be given is meager. Yes, hang one a year, so that others will be discouraged.” Pictures with a portrait of Peter I and similar text can be easily found in enough large public pages on VKontakte, as well as in publications on Facebook, Twitter, Pikabu, Pinterest, "IDAPrikol" and other resources. A legislative act that is radical in modern times has attracted the attention of authors over the years. several artistic and popular science publications.

Judging by Google search results, Peter’s decree on “trade in the subsoil of the earth” has been known not so long ago. It became popular on social networks, probably in 2017, when a picture with the text of the decree appeared on Pikabu. A year later, a certain Lilya Meshcheryakova published this text, which later became the basis for many popular pictures on the Internet, is on the website Stihi.ru. This is a portal provides the opportunity for any authors to freely publish their works, but often texts that have nothing to do with fiction are also posted there. Also in 2018, a decree mentioned in an interview with four-time Olympic biathlon champion Alexander Tikhonov. Then they began appear and the first attempts to figure out whether such a document actually existed.

The text that has gone viral is usually preceded by the words “Decree 1669.” Some Internet users (for example, the public “USSR - Let’s Remember Everything” on VKontakte) think This is the year the decree was issued. In this case, it is not entirely clear what relation Peter I might have to him, born only in 1672. If we mean the number of the decree, then in the “Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire” under No. 1669 appears Decree of January 12, 1699 “On deferment for serving people on the occasion of a campaign, in all court cases.” It says nothing about the trade in natural resources. Moreover, there are no such formulations at all in the decrees of Peter the Great’s time, neither in the “Complete Assembly” nor in the collection "Legislative acts of Peter I", prepared at the USSR Academy of Sciences, nor in collections decrees of Peter I on the website of the Presidential Library. Yeltsin.

It also raises questions that in different sources on the Internet various “occupations” in this decree allegedly issued by Peter I are called “the business of primordial thieves.” IN social networks and even some non-academic In publications there are versions mentioning fish, sugar, iron, metal, gold, or any trade in general. We also note that we were unable to find any of these citations in academic studies or speeches by authoritative historians specializing in the Petrine era.

We are probably dealing with a relatively recent stylization, similar to another popular one on the Internet decree Peter I about the dashing and foolish appearance that a subordinate should have in the face of his superiors. Some of the vocabulary used in the text also supports this version. For example, “National Corpus of the Russian Language” fixes the use of the word "minor" only from the 1830s - it is extremely unlikely that it was used in the early 18th century and then forgotten for a hundred years.

For the first time, as far as we can tell, such a phrase appeared in 1991 in one of the issues of the magazine “Dialogue” - the official publication of the CPSU Central Committee, which replaced the magazine “Agitator”. At that time, Dialogue periodically published fictitious “conversations of our correspondent... about the time of perestroika” with various historical figures. A similar interview with Peter I by Sergei Kondakov appeared in one of the issues. One of the emperor’s answers was this: “Trading has always been a business of thieves, therefore, set them the most meager salaries, and also hang them one at a time, so that they would be discouraging.”

Thus, the legislative act, which is often mentioned by users of social networks, apparently never existed - at least, the relevant documents have not survived. Such a decree is not mentioned by authoritative researchers, and for the first time such wording can be found in a fictitious interview with Peter I, published in 1991. Subsequently, the wording changed slightly, “trading business” began to be replaced by trade in “the bowels of the earth” and not only, and for greater authority, a fragment of, in fact, a work of art began to be presented in the form of a real decree of the first Russian emperor.