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ceptional position of Finland and her diet, an attack thatwas only temporarily suspended by the 1905 Revolution.The chief result of this drive towards centralizing uniformitywas that in 1905, and still more in 1917, russianizationwas added to the other counts against tsarism byall the non-Russians of the empire and by Russian liberaland revolutionary opinion. 'Great Russian chauvinism'was not, however, merely a creation of the tsarist governmentthat could disappear at a stroke in 1917: it hadpopular if unsavoury or distorted roots, and for manyyears after the Revolution its legacy was one of the mainobstacles in the rebuilding of the Soviet peoples in theUnion (cf. pp. 66 and 234).The last of the characteristics of tsarism that have beensingled out in this section is the range of state action,the idea of the omnicompetence of the state and of thederivative character of all other associations, save thechurch. Even the church was from the sixteenthcentury onwards so closely identified with the tsar thatit could be recast by Peter the Great without any violentstruggle in such a way that thereafter it became to a largeextent yet another arm of the lay power (see pp. 193-194).During the two centuries before Peter the growth ofthe compulsory service state had involved a growth inthe effectiveness and range of state intervention, eventhough much was still left: to local action (or inaction)and even though, as will be seen in the next chapter,the largest single class in the country, the bonded serfsof the landowners, was becoming in effect handed overto the rule of their masters with less and less controlfrom the state. In the seventeenth century the mainfunctions of government comprised not only defence,foreign affairs, justice, internal order, and currency, butcolonization, communications, ransom of prisoners,foreign trade and important sections of internal trade,in addition to a medley of lesser functions. Increasing,though spasmodic, attention was also being given tothe development by the state of new sources of production,especially in connexion with the army. TsarAlexis (b. 1629; reigned 1645-76), with his enormousproperties, was himself in his later years the largest single115