In the era of Peter the Great, a new genre of regulations appeared in the Russian official language,
with the help of which the authorities tried to introduce new, European principles of governing the country in
Russia. The authors of the regulations were faced with the difficult task of finding speech means adequate to the
new genre, corresponding both to the communicative tasks and to the addressee of the regulations. The performed
analysis demonstrates a significant update of the means of the official language used in the Peter’s regulations. In
particular, the ways of expressing imperative have undergone a significant transformation. Along with the
independent infinitive, which was inherited from pre-Petrine official speech, imperativeness begins to be expressed
by various lexical means – both Russian and borrowed in origin (Polonisms, Germanisms, Latinisms): modifiers
dolzhen ‘must’, imet’ ‘have to’, nadlezhit ‘should’, prinuzhden ‘be forced’, etc. in combination with the infinitive,
a particle da ‘let’ in combination with a verb in the present or future tense, etc. The models differed not only in origin
and stylistic coloring, but also in their compatibility. Changes in the system of imperative means were due to
various reasons – semantic (the need to more accurately express the imperative meaning), stylistic (the desire to
make a business text more bookish, to tear it away from the colloquial basis), socio-cultural (the influence of
European text patterns and socio-cultural models).