The back dust jacket of my Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, published by Yale University Press in 1998, has an image taken from the side of Carlo Rastrelli's bronze bust of Peter, which shows him as Pygmalion, putting the finishing touches to a statue of a woman. The subject of that book was Peter's New Russia (the sculpture) as much as Peter himself (the sculptor) and its structure reflected this emphasis, with a central core of thematic chapters on war and diplomacy, army and navy, government, economy, society, culture, the court, education and religion sandwiched between an introductory section on Peter's background and youth and a conclusion on his personality, his family and associates and the Petrine legacy. The chronologically arranged chapter on foreign policy provided a framework into which the rest of the reign could be placed, but otherwise the grand narrative and the chronological interconnectedness of life, war and reform were abandoned. This approach had the advantage of allowing detailed analysis of individual topics spread over the whole reign, but it lost something of the dynamics of Peter's personal development, his interaction with other people over time and the evolution of his reforms, even if Peter was a looming presence throughout. I did not set out to write a life of Peter, but apparently this was by no means evident to some of the reviewers, who insisted on calling the book a ‘biography’, in some cases praising it as a good one, in others finding it somewhat lacking with respect to narrative flow and/or psychological depth. I am therefore grateful to Yale University Press for allowing me a second bite at the cherry in order to write ‘Peter the Little’, as this smaller book has informally been known while I was writing it, with a different readership in mind. In particular, I hope that this slimmed-down Peter will prove useful to students and other readers who are interested in Peter and his Russia but could not face ploughing through more than 600 densely footnoted pages.
Anyone writing Peter's life – and there have been many attempts – encounters the usual biographer's dilemma of striking a balance between the public man and the ‘real’, private Peter. The first Russian publications on the topic in the eighteenth century were modelled on Western exemplary lives of monarchs, statesmen and soldiers, which were biographical to the extent that they provided a chronological narrative about the life of a single individual, but concentrated on public rather than private activities, in fact, on the sort of topics Peter himself advocated in 1722 to the compilers of an official history of his reign, whom he instructed to write about
what was done during this past war and what regulations were made on civil and military order, statutes for both branches of the services and the ecclesiastical regulation; also about the building of fortresses, harbours, fleets of ships and galleys and various manufactures, and about construction work in St Petersburg, on Kotlin island and in other places.1
It was widely held that private life was irrelevant to the chronicles of great men. Voltaire, for example, insisted that his own history of Peter's reign was ‘the transactions of his public life’, not ‘the secrets of his cabinet, his bed, or his table’.2 This approach may work with those world figures (few, surely) who single-mindedly dedicated themselves to pursuing public goals to the exclusion of everything else; but this was patently not the case with Peter, whose life was filled with personal drama and bizarre incident. The hero of Poltava and founder of the Russian navy, the absolute ruler of one of the biggest countries in the world, married an illiterate peasant woman and deferred to a mock sovereign known as Prince-Caesar, signing himself in letters as simple Peter Mikhailov or ‘Piter’. His love of inversion and parody, of the ‘world turned upside down’, was clearly a key element in his style of rulership, not just relaxation or aberration. The man credited with bringing civilisation to Russia numbered among his hobbies extracting teeth, performing autopsies, wood-turning and fire-fighting. The Father of the Fatherland condemned his eldest son to death. The founder of St Petersburg preferred to live in small wooden houses with low ceilings. All this and much more – alcoholic binges, sexual excesses, crudity and violence – co-existed with a life dedicated to duty and crowned with achievements which formed the basis of official biographies of Peter, in both Tsarist and Soviet times. In this book I have tried to show both the private and the public Peter, with the assumption that most readers will find the private Peter interesting primarily because he was emperor of Russia.
Readers of Russia in the Age of Peter the Great who have come back for more will find much which is familiar – I have found no reason to change my treatment of key issues – and also some passages from the earlier book but, I hope, will discover new emphases and new material. In particular, this book is concerned with Peter's image, in both the literal and the figurative sense. Probably no Russian ruler left and inspired so many physical reminders of his life and activities. He was the first tsar (perhaps the first Russian) whose likeness was consistently recognisable and he remains one of the few Romanov rulers whose face Russians today can easily identify, although that may change as figures more or less consigned to oblivion in the Soviet era, such as Catherine II, Alexander III and Nicholas II, are rehabilitated. Both written and visual materials were in turn inspired by Petrine anniversaries, such as his bicentenary in 1872, which also prompted the creation or preservation of museum displays and memorial sites. Yet Peter's visual legacy has been studied much less than the huge body of written texts on his life and reign, to which several monographs have been devoted. Each of my first ten chapters includes an examination of key portraits and other images of Peter produced by Russian and foreign artists, starting with the ‘measuring’ icon of St Peter made to mark his birth in 1672 and ending with depictions of him on his deathbed in 1725. In the penultimate chapter I assess Peter's legacy (the balance sheet of reform) and discuss views of Peter, from immediate reactions to his death to the fragmentation of opinion which occurred in the last few years of the Soviet Union. In the final chapter I examine how Peter has been commemorated since his death – by artists and sculptors, in buildings, galleries, museums and anniversary celebrations – up to the present day, an investigation which remains open-ended as ever more images are generated to meet new post-Soviet requirements. As this book goes to press, the tercentenary of the founding of St Petersburg (2003) is approaching, an event which promises to add much in the way of memorabilia and writings.
On one level, my approach has been to dismantle the bigger book and put it back together in the ‘correct’ order, discarding much of the finer details of reforms and historiographical debate and putting Peter more firmly in the picture. Generally I have cut down on documentation, usually only footnoting direct quotations and relegating most English sources consulted and recommendations for further reading to the Select Bibliography at the end of the book. Although the main narrative of the little book is based on the same sources as the big book, the last two chapters contain new material relating to ‘Petrine places’, statues and paintings, the Petrine collections in the Hermitage, and recent publications. I have reduced Russian terms in the text, including transliterated words and phrases in brackets, to a minimum. In general, I have assumed that Russian-speaking readers who need access to fuller documentation will consult the big book which also contains a discussion of the major sources for Peter's reign.
For this opportunity to tell Peter's story I am indebted to Robert Baldock, my ever-patient and supportive editor in Yale University Press's London office and to his colleague Diana Yeh. The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, provided study leave and the British Academy a research grant to allow me to make visits to St Petersburg and Moscow in 1999–2000. Although primarily for the purpose of researching a project on landmarks of Russian visual culture, these trips led to the discovery of interesting new material and provoked fresh thoughts on Peter's reputation and image in Russia today. I am indebted to the following people and institutions: in St Petersburg, Evgeny Anisimov, Elena Mozgovaia, Elena and Mikhail Stolbov; the libraries of the Russian Museum and Academy of Arts; the Department of the History of Russian Culture in the State Hermitage (Viacheslav Fedorov, Irina Kotel'nikova, Galina Moiseeva, Evelina Tarasova) and the ‘Palace of Peter I’ exhibition; in Moscow, Galina Andreeva, Dmitry Fedosov, Olga Kosheleva, and staff in the State Historical Library. (Acknowledgements for material collected on earlier occasions can be found in the preface to Russia in the Age of Peter the Great.) As always, my friends in the Study Group on 18th-Century Russia have provided stimulating ideas and feedback and Caroline Newlove in SSEES gave invaluable practical help. My partner Jim Cutshall has supported me in all sorts of ways, including helping with the index, taking some of the photographs and unearthing some interesting items of Petrine memorabilia during expeditions to antiques and book fairs. Last but not least, my thanks to the cats Sophie and Catherine, who have now seen me through three books and one collective volume on the Petrine era (which, sadly, is not rich in feline themes) and several times that number of articles and papers. One reviewer of Russia in the Age of Peter the Great was actually under the impression that Sophie was the author and referred to her as Professor of Russian History at London University but luckily this didn't go to her head. Any errors in this book are, of course, my own.
Note on Transliteration, Dates and Monetary Units
Apart from certain transcribed terms, quotations from Russian sources are given in English translation, in most cases my own, unless otherwise stated. Russian proper names, terms and bibliographic references have been transcribed using a modified Library of Congress system, with further adaptations in the interest of readability in the main text. Feminine proper names, which in Russian have alternative spellings – with a soft sign (Mar'ia) or -iia (Mariia) – are all rendered as -ia, e.g. Maria, Natalia, Evdokia. The -ii and -yi endings of masculine proper names are simplified to -y, e.g. Dmitry, Vasily. Names of some famous individuals are given in their English equivalents, e.g. Peter (Petr), Catherine (Ekaterina), Sophia (Sof'ia or Sofiia), Alexis (Aleksei). In transcribed citations and bibliographical references, however, original spellings are rendered in full.
Dates (days and months) for Peter's reign are usually given in Old Style, i.e., according to the Julian calendar which was in use in Russia until 1918 and in the seventeenth century was ten days and in the eighteenth eleven days behind the New Style Gregorian calendar, which was adopted from the 1590s by many European countries. In a few cases the New Style (NS) date is given in brackets.
Units of currency referred to in the text had the following value:
1 rouble = 100 kopecks
1 Joachimsthaler = about 1 rouble (the value fluctuated)
