XI

Legacy

‘Soldier's Lament by the Tomb of Peter the Great’ (early eighteenth century)¹

The emperor is dead. Long live the empress

The departure of a larger-than-life figure who had reigned in Russia since 1682 and ruled it for more than a quarter of a century, was bound to arouse strong feelings. From Moscow, where a requiem mass was held in the Dormition Cathedral, Senator Andrei Matveev, Peter's childhood friend, wrote to Aleksei Makarov that news of the ‘tragedy’ provoked such howls, cries and tearful wailing among men that women could scarcely have howled and sobbed more bitterly. ‘I have never in my life seen or heard such horror among the populace as was heard in all the parishes and streets when the announcement was made.’ Russian students in Amsterdam also ‘wept inconsolably’ at the news.² Ivan Nepliuev, who had been tested by Peter in person when he returned from naval training abroad a decade earlier, recalls that he was in a kind of ‘delirium’ for a whole day.³ Judging by the admittedly problematical evidence of popular songs, written down long after the event, many common soldiers felt bereft, too. To what extent such reactions reflected ritualised responses is hard to say. One is reminded of 1953, when ordinary Soviet citizens wept on the streets at the news of Stalin's death.

The immediate response of Peter's sworn enemies is less easy to determine. Religious dissidents' delight at Peter's death, for example, has been linked with popular prints of ‘The Mice Bury the Cat’. In fact, the subject, a carnivalesque ‘world turned upside down’, dates from the late seventeenth century and probably only some time after Peter's death were certain clues, such as the number of mourners and horses, used to link the print with his funeral cortège. It is easy to see why people made the connection, and also why the parody might be interpreted as a reference to the Drunken Assembly, which regularly featured pigs and bears harnessed to carts, as well as ‘bestial’ human behaviour, which traditionalists took as one of many clues that Peter was the Antichrist.

Abroad, Peter's death gave rise to fears of destabilisation. ‘News we have had here of the late great Event in Muscovy by the Czar's death, which will undoubtedly have a considerable effect on most countrys in Europe,’ a British commentator wrote.⁴ In identical reports to their respective sovereigns the Prussian and the French ministers in St Petersburg wrote of ‘the dread it has struck in the inhabitants who fear disturbances, above all as nothing has been settled concerning the succession’.⁵ In fact, continuity was assured by the accession of Catherine. She apparently had no desire to rule and pressed the claim of Grand Duke Peter Alekseevich, but the powerful men who backed her – Menshikov, Pavel Iaguzhinsky, Aleksei Makarov, Andrei Osterman, Peter Tolstoy – were anxious to block the re-emergence of the late Tsarevich Alexis's party. Luckily for them, it was widely believed that Peter had indicated his wish for his wife to succeed him by crowning her as his consort. It was inconvenient that he had not named her publicly as his heir, but his supposed wishes proved sufficient to get the backing needed to clinch the succession with the support of the guards, also Peter's personal creation.

Catherine's short reign, which ended with her premature death in May 1727, provides an excellent illustration of how autocracy continued to operate successfully under a ruler who had little interest in or talent for ruling. Even Catherine's gender proved to be an advantage rather than a handicap. Her shaky qualifications for the job on the grounds of merit were offset by the rhetoric that not only would she rule in Peter's spirit but she had actually been ‘created’ by him, like gold in an alchemist's crucible. The last thing the men close to the throne actually wanted was another Peter – with all that implied about exhausting work schedules, the danger of being clouted with a cudgel or humiliated in some shaming ceremony. Compared with this, a woman ruler promised respite and some room for manoeuvre. Add the rhetoric of motherhood (Catherine was the all-caring Mother of Russia) and throw in some stock comparisons with classical rulers and goddesses, and the illiterate peasant woman was transformed into the ruling Empress of All Russia. She could enjoy the trappings of power, while the men who now ruled Russia, several of them also Peter's creations, could take stock and discreetly recommend suspending or discarding those parts of the Petrine heritage which were proving inconvenient and costly.

In a ‘Memorandum on the needs of the state’⁶ presented to Catherine in November 1726, the leading men of her government concluded that

nearly all affairs – both spiritual and temporal – are in disarray and require speedy correction. … Not only the peasantry, on whom the maintenance of the army is laid, are in dire need and are being reduced to complete and utter ruin by heavy taxation and continual punitive expeditions and other irregularities, but other areas such as commerce, justice and the mints are also in a state of decay.

They recommended that ‘since the army is so vital that the state cannot prevail without it, therefore we must look to the welfare of the peasant, for the soldier is linked to the peasant like the soul to the body, and if there is no peasant there will be no soldier’. They called for concessions on the poll tax (which was reduced from 74 to 70 kopecks) and reorganisation in the countryside, where ‘the peasant has a dozen or more commanders instead of one – military officers, fiscals, voevodas, forest supervisors and others, some of whom are not so much pastors as wolves attacking the flock’.

Menshikov and his colleagues proposed a partial demobilisation of the army, which would have the dual advantage of saving on wages and allowing some landlords to return to their villages to restore order. They hoped that ‘the wretched peasantry, by which all the army and in part the fleet are maintained, may enjoy some respite and order and that many, when they hear of these concessions, will return from flight’. The authors of this memorandum had an agenda of their own, namely to redress the balance between the conflicting claims of the state and the landowners on the peasants' labour in favour of the landowners. It is no coincidence that the decades following Peter's death saw reductions both in the nobility's service requirements and in the poll tax. The memorandum also denounced several cherished reforms for destroying livelihoods, such as the diversion of the Archangel trade to St Petersburg and legislation on new looms, but nowhere did it criticise Peter himself, despite the fact that his policies had left many parts of Russia in ruins. The Memorandum of 1726 was for private consumption: official rhetoric told a different story.

The balance sheet of domestic reform

A medal issued in 1725 bears an image of Peter borne aloft by Eternity looking down at a seated woman personifying Russia, with attributes of the arts and sciences at her feet, and the legend: SEE WHAT A GOOD CONDITION I LEAVE YOU IN. A variation on the theme was the metaphor of Peter as sculptor. ‘All Russia is your statue,’ wrote Prokopovich in 1726, ‘transformed by you with skilful craftsmanship,’⁷ like the Galatea-Russia fashioned by Pygmalion-Peter's chisel depicted on Rastrelli's bronze bust. In his power to transform, Peter was superhuman and death-defying. In a sermon delivered on the first anniversary of Peter's death, Abbot Gavriil Buzhinsky, head chaplain to the fleet, declared: ‘Peter the Great is alive: I am the resurrection and the life … and whosoever believeth in me shall have eternal life.’⁸ Peter provided a stable reference point not only during the rapid turnover of emperors and empresses which occurred in the years 1725–62, but also to the end of the Romanov dynasty. The first principles firmly observed by Russia's eighteenthand nineteenth-century rulers were that Peter himself was beyond reproach and that they ruled in his spirit.

Empress Anna (1730–40) shared her uncle's passion for jesters and masquerades, while mastering much of his rhetoric about the common good. His daughter Elizabeth (1741–61), ‘equally great, equally first/A goddess on earth like Minerva’, as the poet V. K. Trediakovsky enthused in 1756, exploited her father's legacy shamelessly, while Catherine II (1762–96) cultivated the image of Peter's ‘spiritual daughter’ in public, but privately deplored Peter's coarseness and brutality. As contemporaries declared, Peter gave Russians bodies but Catherine gave them souls. In August 1770 in a splendid piece of political theatre, she placed a Turkish naval standard captured at the battle of Chesme on Peter's tomb, after which Metropolitan Platon delivered a sermon, which began with the summons, delivered in a booming voice, ‘Arise now, Great Monarch, Father of our Fatherland. Arise and look upon your handiwork; it has not decayed with time and its glory has not dimmed.’⁹ In the congregation, Catherine's sixteen-year-old son Paul was terrified that his great-grandfather really was about to emerge from his tomb. As Paul I (1796–1801), he emulated Peter by combining devotion to the common good with authoritarian rule, but neglected patriotism, to disastrous effect. Alexander I (1801–25) was by all accounts less devoted to Peter's memory, but in 1814 even he paid a visit to the little house in Zaandam, leaving a hand-written note: ‘To Peter the Great from Alexander’. His brother Nicholas I (1825–55) admired Peter to the point of veneration, contributing to his cult through museums and monuments, while the bicentenary of Peter's birth in 1872 provided opportunities for a fellow reformer, Alexander II (1855–81), to cast some of his own activities in the Petrine mould. His son, the bear-like Alexander III (1881–94), admired Peter's qualities as a ‘man of the people’. Perhaps only the slightly-built Nicholas II (1894–1917) was uncomfortable with Peter as a role model, preferring the more pious and cautious Moscow-rooted image of the seventeenth-century Romanovs, although he did take advantage of the Petrine anniversaries which fell within his reign.

So, some rulers admired Peter more than others, but officially his reputation was sacrosanct. The complete Petrine package of reform was another matter, however. Central government by and large retained its Petrine outlines, the Senate and the procurator-general surviving until 1917 and the collegiate system until the early nineteenth century, but other administrative reforms quickly withered because they had never taken root. Among the first victims was much of the paraphernalia of provincial offices and posts with Germanic names. Peter's ambitious multi-tiered system of new courts and his attempt to separate the administrative and judicial systems also proved a failure, mainly as a result of the lack of qualified personnel and conflict with established local power bases. In 1727 the courts of appeal were closed and military governors resumed control in law as well as in fact. Peter may not have mastered the provinces and the periphery of his empire, but neither did his successors. They continued to experience both misconduct by local officials and widespread popular disobedience, at worst major outbreaks encompassing whole regions, of which the most devastating was the Pugachev revolt of 1773–74. Catherine II's response was the Statute on Provincial Administration (1775), which acknowledged that Russia's problem was not so much an overarching, all-powerful state as under-administration, which hampered both the government's ability to control the population and the people's access to redress and protection. This and other measures sought, with limited success, to harness the voluntary efforts of the nobility in the provinces, something which Peter tried to do but failed, mainly because his nobles were always on the move and under severe pressure.

Peter's belief that the best means of promoting the common good was to make laws, and plenty of them, proved illusory. In volume, Peter's edicts surpassed those of his Muscovite predecessors many times over, but his success in enforcing laws was patchy and his efforts to codify the laws came to nothing, so the vast body of old and new legal acts remained scattered in the archives of state departments. Often even the judges, who received no special training, did not know the laws. The Military and Naval Statutes, which at least existed in single published editions, were used for both civil and criminal cases well into the eighteenth century and Tsar Alexis's law code of 1649 continued to operate. Catherine II's attempt to codify the laws also failed, although she presented the exercise in a Petrine framework. A miniature portrait (1770–80) of Catherine writing her 1767 Instruction to the Legislative Commission features a marble bust of Peter on the desk beside her.¹⁰ Codification was achieved only in the 1830s.

After Peter's death some of his own favourite legislation was repealed. This was the fate in 1731 of the Law on Single Inheritance of 1714, never popular with the land-owning service class. The 1722 law on the succession to the throne survived to determine the accession of six monarchs – Catherine I, Peter II, Anna, Ivan VI, Peter III and Paul – while two others (Elizabeth and Catherine II) used palace coups to establish their claims, then evoked Peter's spirit. The law was repealed in 1797 by Paul, who had lived in fear of his mother disinheriting him in favour of one of his sons. Thereafter for the rest of the Romanov era primogeniture was restored, which meant, among other things, no more women rulers.

It suited both the rulers and the elite to live with amended versions of some of Peter's civil reforms, for example the Table of Ranks, which survived to the end of imperial Russia. Peter did not intend to do away with a hereditary élite in principle, nor did he do so in practice. In 1730, for example, of the 179 officials in the top four classes of the Table, nine-tenths were descended from old Muscovite noble families and one-third from men who recently had been boyars. After Peter's death it became harder for outsiders to enter the Table. By the 1770s anyone liable to poll tax was excluded and it became harder to become a hereditary noble by being promoted within the civilian ranks. At the same time, it suited both the servitors and the state to reduce the period of compulsory service. In 1736 service was reduced to twenty-five years and in 1762 the requirement was abolished, although state service remained a way of life for most nobles.

Peter made an indelible impression on the church, which remained firmly subordinated to the state and without a patriarch until 1917, after which Russia's new Bolshevik masters reduced it even more brutally under a patriarch of their own choosing. For the rest of the imperial era the Holy Synod governed the church and the over-procurator watched over its personnel. There was no reversal of Peter's policy of reducing the church's financial independence and restricting entry into monasteries, principles which later in the century gained the seal of approval from the luminaries of the Enlightenment. Under Peter III and Catherine II peasants on monastery estates (about two million souls) were transferred from the church to the jurisdiction of the State College of Economy. At the same time, all Peter's successors, like Peter himself, promoted the centrality of Orthodoxy to the Russian way of life, exploiting religion as an element in foreign policy when appropriate. Foreigners were free to worship in their own churches – there was no official revival of the old Muscovite ghetto mentality – but attempts to convert Russians were strictly outlawed. Peter never intended to secularise Russia or to throw it open to proselytising by other faiths, only to limit the church's power to those areas which the state deemed to be the church's business. For the mass of the people the church, its calendar and its culture continued to play much the same central role in their lives as they had done for their Muscovite ancestors. From Nicholas I onwards, the term ‘Holy Russia’ (rarely, if ever, heard in the eighteenth century) was revived and Orthodox principles were vigorously promoted in élite circles, too.

Peter's impact on the Russian economy is more controversial. The jury is still out on the question of whether he accelerated or slowed the development of capitalism in Russia. On the face of it, he produced success stories – the two dozen or so factories in operation when Peter came to the throne grew to almost 200 by his death. He did not accumulate a foreign debt. Russia was self-sufficient in some areas of arms and textile manufacture and poised to become the world's leading producer of pig iron by the 1740s. The opening of new sea and river routes, the acquisition of ports, the development of a merchant marine – all should have fostered wealth-creating trade. However, private enterprise remained weak, little capital was accumulated, much trade was in the hands of foreigners, as were insurance and banking, and towns were underdeveloped. There was no ‘great leap forward’. Peter's economy operated in a traditional framework: war or defence created its momentum, autocracy and serfdom allowed Peter to cope with military demands. It boiled down to making the most of Russia's ‘backwardness’ by applying absolute power to extract service, labour and taxes from all parts of the population, with the bulk coming from the 90 per cent who were peasants. The state played a disproportionate role in industrial growth and continued to do so for the rest of the tsarist era. Under Peter's immediate successors the biggest improvements to the national economy came not in industry but in agriculture, when expansion into the black-earth steppe lands in Catherine II's reign produced a surplus of grain and other produce for export. The winners tended to be those nobles who successfully exploited the manorial economy rather than industrialists, the most successful of whom aspired to become nobles. Ironically, some of the most successful private entrepreneurs were Old Believers, who accumulated capital by mutual self-help and thrift without aspiring to join the imperial establishment.

World power

Ultimately, the sacrifices made by all sections of the population were justified by international success. Peter made Russia a great power, which it remained by and large, until very recently. (To assess whether currently Russia is going up in the world or coming down is beyond the scope of this book.) When the Senate in its address to Peter in October 1721 boasted that Russia had ‘joined the community of political nations’ it had in mind nations high up in the international pecking order and in control of their own destinies. ‘Political’ nations concurred that Peter's Russia was a force in world politics, not only its immediate neighbours, but also France, Spain and particularly Britain, which feared the effect of Russian expansion on its Baltic trade. ‘Thanks to him Russia, the name of which was unknown not long ago,’ wrote Campredon in 1723, ‘now has become the object of attention of the greater part of European powers who seek her friendship, some for fear of seeing her hostile to their interests, others for the sake of the benefits which they hope to obtain through an alliance.’¹¹ In 1726 Russia signed a defensive alliance with Austria, which proved to be a cornerstone of international politics.

But Russia's relationship with the wider world is also one of the most controversial aspects of Peter's legacy. His notorious ‘Testament’, first published in France in 1812, was long ago unmasked as a forgery. Even so, for all its absurdities, this plan for expansion inspired by unbridled ambition reflected certain tendencies in Russia's imperial policy in the eighteenth century. Peter built on or laid the foundations of policies – participation as a full partner in world diplomacy and in European dynastic politics, keeping Poland weak, expansion towards the ‘natural’ boundaries of coastlines and/or fellow Orthodox populations, probes into alien territory for exploration and trade – which were to bring Russia into conflict with other powers and give birth to the image of the aggressive Russian ‘bear’, intervening on behalf of the Orthodox in the Ottoman empire, partitioning Poland, playing the ‘great game’ in Central Asia.

Some modern historians have argued that of all Peter's legacies, great power status, the most glorious according to the rhetoric of eighteenth-century power politics, was the most destructive. Expansion fuelled by autocracy and serfdom created demands which perpetuated these two institutions, keeping the Russian people poor and enslaved. The impetus for devoting most of the national budget to defence was created by fear not only of foreign enemies across the borders, but also of disaffected subjects inside the expanding empire. The growth of empire created ‘strategic overstretch’ in a country without overseas colonies whose most easily exploitable natural resource was its own population. In order to justify sacrifices, even in peacetime a strong army and navy were equated with national pride, boasted about in official publicity and displayed on ceremonial occasions. All Russia's emperors from Peter onwards presented themselves primarily as soldiers and preferred to be surrounded by military and naval men. Even the eighteenth-century empresses sometimes donned the uniform of the guards.

In his intense personal involvement in things military Peter set a dangerous precedent, particularly in respect of the fleet, which became a vital component in the myth of Peter's fashioning of Russia ‘out of nothingness’, a feat with biblical resonances. ‘He was your first Japhet!’ declared Prokopovich in his funeral oration. ‘He has accomplished a deed hitherto unheard of in Russia: the building and sailing of ships, of a new fleet that yields to none among the old ones. It was a deed beyond the whole world's expectations and admiration and it opened up to thee, Russia, the way to all corners of the earth and carried thy power and glory to the remotest oceans.’¹² In Peter's time this enthusiasm was not widely shared. ‘The Russian nation has little inclination for naval affairs but rather regards it all as an unnecessary expense,’ commented Georg Grund. ‘The fleet is regarded more as a whim of the tsar's than an essential for Russia's military strength.’¹³ Peter's immediate successors lacked the personal commitment and resources to keep the fleet going and by the 1730s Russia to all intents and purposes lacked a viable fleet. ‘The Muscovites do not seem to be such a terrible people as they were when the Czar was living,’ wrote Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Wagner in 1726.¹⁴ Yet as an essential component in Russia's great power status the fleet was not easily abandoned and was revived under Catherine II. The Russian historian Evgeny Anisimov has compared the cost of building and maintaining a navy in the early modern world with that of developing a space programme in the later twentieth century. It is an apt analogy, especially in the Russian context. Both Peter's navy and the USSR's space rockets generated a host of symbols above and beyond their immediate function, conveying the clear message that Russia was a major contender on the world stage, equipped with the means of conquering worlds beyond its immediate frontiers. At the same time, both attracted criticism for wasting public funds which might have been put to better use.

Window on the West

Perhaps the longest-running debate about Peter's legacy concerns Russian national identity. Peter never called St Petersburg his ‘window on the West’ (the phrase seems to have originated with the Italian traveller Francesco Algarotti's reference in 1739 to ‘this great window recently opened in the north through which Russia looks on Europe'¹⁵) but more than anything else he created, the city became associated with his vision of making Russia more Western. Sankt-Piter-Burkh (strictly speaking, the city of St Peter rather than ‘Peter's city') was Peter's creation, even if he left just the vision and outline of his ‘Paradise’ rather than the finished product. The everyday reality in 1725 and for years to come was a sort of ribbon development, with splendid buildings jostling for space on the embankments and behind them wretched hovels and general squalor. Rural disorder always threatened to disrupt the symmetry of the model city. A series of edicts issued during the tsar's lifetime warned residents not to allow cows, goats, pigs and other livestock to wander around the streets unless accompanied by herdsmen, but repetitions of the orders show that no one paid much attention to them. The Russian countryside was never far away, even in the capital.

When Peter died St Petersburg was only twenty-two years old and most of its major buildings less than fifteen years old. Few of its inhabitants had lived there for much more than ten years, yet their lives had been transformed, especially those of the élite. Memoirs of the period immediately after Peter's death show that the lifestyle introduced under Peter did not change: fireworks, illuminations, balls, mixed company were the order of the day, even if Peter's ‘democratic’ assemblies were abandoned in favour of more exclusive gatherings. For upper-class women in particular there was to be no return to the segregated terem (how could there be, with empresses on the throne?), even if a woman's function in society, like that of her Western counterparts, was still to make a suitable marriage, be a decorative companion and produce children. There was some talk among conservatives, it is true, of a return to Moscow, after Peter II's court was based there throughout his short reign. A writer in the British Journal in March 1730 voiced fears that inland trade would not be revived ‘unless the Empire of Russia rouses itself from under the lethargic slumber, which it is now fallen into; their furred Gowns and long Petticoats will return upon them; and all the sordid affectation of a singularity from all the world, which made them so truly contemptible before, will do the like again …’¹⁶ These fears (or hopes, for those European neighbours who would have preferred to see Russia marginalised) were unfounded. After her coronation in 1731 Empress Anna returned the court to St Petersburg and sponsored aspects of Western culture which were barely developed in Peter's reign, such as ballet and opera. Peter's successors built on his cultural legacy, extending it more widely through the empire, as for example in Catherine II's programme for reconstructing the centres of provincial capitals in the classical style, although the mass of the population were unaffected.

Secular publishing, especially of practical manuals, experienced a sharp decline once Peter's personal sponsorship was removed. Several presses were closed and by 1728 as a result of huge deficits and unsold stock Peter's publishing operation was all but dismantled. In the late 1720s only about twenty books were published each year. But as their service requirement was reduced, some of the élite had more time to devote to reading and in some cases writing. The Academy of Sciences became a major publisher of scientific and scholarly literature and in Elizabeth's reign, and particularly in Catherine II's, translations of major works of European literature and philosophy became available in print, as well as works by Russian authors. Peter's project for an Academy of Arts was finally realised in 1757, when Russian artists were trained to work in areas of the figurative arts such as sculpture and history painting which in Peter's reign had been practised almost exclusively by foreigners. Peter did not secularise Russian culture, although he changed the priorities of high culture irrevocably. There continued to be a strong demand for religious art and architecture and most Western-trained Russian artists working in the capitals painted icons as well as secular works. In 1764, for example, the painter A. P. Antropov sent a petition to Catherine II requesting payment for an icon of the Nativity of Christ, two shrouds with Christ's image and two portraits of the empress which he had painted for her coronation, a characteristic mix of the sacred and secular.

Peter, as we know, regarded Western dress as a signifier of civilisation, and at court and in upper-class homes Western norms were firmly established. The Russian male élite remained clean-shaven until beards came back into fashion in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alexander III was the first Romanov since the seventeenth century to wear a beard, in his case a deliberate signifier of his Russianness. Outside St Petersburg, of course, dress rules were often flouted. In 1726 the authorities learned that officers and non-commissioned officers on leave or in retirement were going around with beards and wearing old-fashioned Russian dress. Peter's decree was reiterated, with the concession that in the absence of a barber the beard could be trimmed with scissors. Infringements met with fines or flogging and deprivation of patents of nobility for any officer who committed a fourth offence.¹⁷ Even some leading nobles were reluctant to throw away their old clothes. An inventory of the belongings of Princes A. G and I. A. Dolgoruky made as a result of their banishment in 1730 contained large quantities of men's and women's pre-reform clothing, easily recognised by the different vocabulary used to describe it. In the reign of Catherine II, Old Russian dress in stylised form began to make a comeback for ladies at court for special occasions. In 1826, an observer at Nicholas I's coronation ball commented approvingly on women wearing what he described as ‘patriotic attire’, recalling a time ‘when Russians were not ashamed of their splendid dress, proper for the climate, which had a national character and was incomparably more beautiful than foreign dress’.¹⁸ Even so, ‘Russian style’ remained a sort of fancy dress reserved for grand special occasions.

It has been argued on the one hand that Peter's cultural reforms led to a loss of national identity and created a deep rift between the élite and the mass of the population; on the other, that his over-ambitious experiment in cultural engineering produced only a superficial imitation of European civilisation. The picture of noble life in the provinces in the seventeenth century as one of ‘almost unrelieved rudeness and coarseness, with a frequently repeated motif of drunkenness and violence’ probably changed little in the decades after Peter's death.¹⁹ For a few Russians, however, ‘becoming Europeans’ had more profound implications than just wearing Western dress and speaking bad French, which, incidentally, became the language of the court in the latter part of the eighteenth century, not in Peter's reign. Becoming more like an Englishman or a Frenchman or a Pole meant demanding a parliament, a free press, corporate rights, a constitutional or elective monarchy. Peter himself had challenged the old Orthodox medieval world view, valid for boyar and peasant alike, in which behaviour was determined by authority and custom, while access to other worlds, either through books or travel, was severely restricted. He encouraged selected Russians to travel abroad, promoted exploration and scientific enquiry, had Western books translated and published and encouraged the learning of foreign languages. Such policies produced at least a handful of questioning individuals, of which Peter himself represented a striking example. The walls of the citadel of medieval Muscovy, in which subjects were locked in and women were locked up, were breached, both by foreigners coming in and Russians going out. The superiority of old Russia, once upheld unquestioningly by guardians of the true faith, was challenged by the need to study at the feet of ‘heretics’. But what gave the reforms their impetus – the example of the tsar himself and his challenge to the traditional image of the Orthodox ruler – also set the limits, for this was reform from above.

Peter enjoyed absolute power, ruling without limitation by any elected or corporate bodies. A succinct formula, borrowed from the Swedish, appears in both the Military and Naval Statutes: ‘His Majesty is a sovereign monarch, who is not answerable to anyone in the world in his affairs, but holds the power and authority to rule his realms and his lands as a Christian monarch by his own will and good opinion.’²⁰ Here at least he left no experiment to be discarded or amended by his successors. The fact that he chose sometimes to defer to the Prince-Caesar or dress like a shipwright emphasised his power rather than detracted from it. Pluralism, the glimmerings, however feeble, of civil society, was killed at birth because the demands of war, which required everyone's efforts to be harnessed, did not allow Peter to break with authoritarian rule. Ironically, the Russian nation's new-style mobility – young men sent abroad to study, women forced to come out and socialise in public, nobles and their families uprooted from Moscow to St Petersburg, whole villages of peasants transferred en masse to work on major new projects – was regarded as just as oppressive as the Moscow-centred ethos of Old Russia.

Few of Peter's successors were as good as he was at getting what they wanted, but they all ruled as autocrats. Two attempts by élite circles to limit autocracy – in 1730 when a small group of top nobles tried to impose a set of conditions on Empress Anna and in 1825 when the Decembrists gathered around the Bronze Horseman statue to demand the abolition of autocracy and serfdom – ended in disgrace or death for the rebels. When autocracy was finally limited, in 1906, Nicholas II (urged by his wife to ‘be Peter the Great') pretended that it hadn't been and almost got away with clawing back concessions until war and revolution swept the old regime away. The long life of Russia's particular brand of absolute monarchy, on which Peter set an indelible seal, suggests that the system was effective as long as Russia was successful.

Reformer or revolutionary? Views of Peter from the 1720s to the 1980s

To conclude this chapter, let us return to the broad outlines of the debate about Peter over the centuries. (For a much fuller treatment of this topic readers should consult the invaluable works of Nicholas Riasanovsky.) Frederick Weber began his influential book on Russia thus: ‘It must be owned not only by all who have been in Russia themselves, but also by those who have any Notion of the Affairs of the North, that for about these twenty Years past Russia has been entirely reformed and changed.’²¹ Ivan Nepliuev, looking back on Peter's reign in old age, wrote: ‘This monarch brought our fatherland to a level with others; he taught us to recognise that we are people too; in a word, whatever you look at in Russia, all has its beginnings with him and whatever is done henceforth will also derive its source from that beginning.’²² As we have seen, neither of these statements is entirely true. Autocracy was not limited, the mass of the Russian population remained enserfed, small towns and villages hardly changed at all and many of the changes that did occur – in the armed forces, the church, culture – were heralded in the reigns of Peter's predecessors. But, viewed with the eyes of a foreigner who witnessed the growth of St Petersburg and the external transformation of its population at first hand or a servitor from an old noble family who was sent on naval training and became a diplomat, Peter must have seemed like a revolutionary. Men in the thick of things like Weber and Nepliuev experienced the full force of the rhetoric which presented Peter as a creative genius and they also encountered the man in the flesh, whose energetic commitment to change was so palpable that both those who welcomed change and those who feared it were convinced he really did have the power to transform Russia, for good or ill, by his own will. What is remarkable is that this impression has never been erased. Apart from a brief interlude during Soviet times, the debate about Peter always starts from the premise that he made a difference.

The view from above, which prevailed for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is epitomised in a laudatory speech composed in 1755 by the first full-time member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Mikhail Lomonosov, himself a beneficiary of Peter's educational reforms, in which he imagines a man leaving Russia at the beginning of Peter's reign and returning much later. On seeing new buildings and customs, the fleet, the arts, knowledge, even rivers altered in their courses, this man would conclude ‘that he had been on his travels many centuries, or that all this had been achieved in so short a time by the common efforts of the whole human race or by the creative hand of the Almighty, or, finally, that it was all a vision seen in a dream’.²³ The notion that Peter accomplished in a few decades what otherwise would have taken centuries, belief in the power of one strong individual to transform a whole country were variously expressed in the imagery of turning darkness into light, non-existence into being, or raw stone into a statue. It remained a central pillar of official ideology until the collapse of the empire. As the historian M. P. Pogodin wrote in 1841:

The Russia of today, that is European Russia, diplomatic, political, military, commercial, industrial, scholarly, literary – is the creation of Peter the Great. Wherever we look, everywhere we encounter that colossal figure, which throws a long shadow over our entire past, and even eliminates old history from our field of vision – a figure which is still stretching, as it were, its arms over us, and which, it seems, will never disappear from sight, no matter how far we advance in the future.²⁴

The first writer seriously to question the benefits of Peter's legacy was Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733–90), who knew the Petrine era better than most of his contemporaries as a result of his work in Peter's archive. Shcherbatov conceded that without Peter Russia would have needed another two hundred years to reach the level of development it had achieved. He praised Peter's promotion of science and rejection of ignorance, his attacks on xenophobia, his conquest of coasts, his ports and fleet. But he also deplored his cruelty, his subordination of the nobility, his treatment of Alexis and the succession, his attacks on religion and custom, and his neglect of Moscow. Shcherbatov's particular target was the ‘corruption of morals’: women, who in Muscovy had been ‘unaware of their beauty, began to realise its power; they began to try to enhance it with suitable clothes, and used far more luxuries in their adornments than their ancestors’. Men, too, in their desire to be attractive to women, strove after self-adornment and ‘voluptuousness and luxury’. There was a high price to pay for Westernisation, both literally and figuratively.²⁵

Russia's first major historian, Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), an admirer of Peter in his youth but influenced by new thinking about national identity and national spirit later in life, assessed the impact of Peter's reforms even more radically than Shcherbatov. In his view, without Peter Russia would have needed six hundred years to catch up. But he too believed that ‘progress’ had been bought at a high price:

Family customs were not spared by the impact of the tsar's activity. The lords opened up their homes; their wives and daughters emerged from the impenetrable teremy; men and women began to mingle in noise-filled rooms at balls and suppers; Russian women ceased to blush at the indiscreet glances of men, and European freedom supplanted Asiatic constraint. … We became citizens of the world but ceased in certain respects to be citizens of Russia. The fault is Peter's.²⁶

Alexander Pushkin, who was at heart an admirer of Peter, gathering material for an unfinished history of his reign, gave poetic form to the doubting voice, notably in The Bronze Horseman (1833) which weighs up Peter's magnificent achievement as epitomised by St Petersburg against the lost happiness of the humble clerk, Evgeny, who dares to challenge the ‘idol’ on the horse.

The issue of Peter and Russian national identity was developed more fully in the debate between the Westernisers and the Slavophiles in the 1830s–50s, which was inaugurated by the claim of Peter Chaadaev (1794–1856) in his first ‘Philosophical Letter’ (published in 1836) that once ‘a great man wanted to civilize us, and in order to give us a foretaste of enlightenment, he threw us the mantle of civilization: we took up the cloak but did not so much as touch civilization’. Chaadaev was unpatriotically scathing about Russia's lack of achievements, but in a later work he conceded that, since Peter, Russia's path had been irrevocably Western – ‘In his hand Peter found only a blank sheet of paper, and he wrote on it: Europe and the West’ – and acknowledged the advantages of backwardness which would allow Russia in time to surpass the West; for ‘if we have come after others, it is in order to do better than the others’.²⁷ Some Westernisers like Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48) adulated Peter – ‘the greatest phenomenon not only of our history, but also of the history of all mankind; he is the divinity that called us to live, breathing a living soul into the body of the old Russia, colossal but plunged in deathly slumber’²⁸ – convinced that Peter's work was incomplete and that further radical political and social reform was needed. In particular, civilisation must be brought to the peasants. Slavophiles, on the other hand, stressed the destructive nature of Peter's reforms, which they deplored as the essentially non-Russian products of Western rationalism, of which artificial St Petersburg was the worst manifestation. They were thankful that the peasants at least had retained their national character, as expressed through their pure Orthodox faith and the peasant commune. In the words of Konstantin Aksakov (1817–60), the government ‘must understand the spirit of Russia and embrace Russian principles, which have been rejected since Peter's day’.²⁹ He and his fellow Slavophiles painted an idyllic picture of Muscovite Russia, with its allegedly harmonious relationship between tsar and people and its indigenous religious culture. Peter was cast in the role of villain, to the extent that the Slavophile Peter Kireevsky loathed his own name.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century professional historians such as S. M. Solov'ev (1820–79) and V. O. Kliuchevsky (1841–1911) revealed much more fully the Muscovite roots of many of Peter's reforms, as well as chronicling and analysing Peter's reign on the basis of scholarly research on primary sources, which tended to reveal the often chaotic and piecemeal nature of his activities. They took a pragmatic, warts and all, view of Peter himself (some of the most famous passages in Kliuchevsky's history described his violent, drunken habits) but they still maintained that Peter spelled Progress, allowing Russia to achieve its rightful status as a world power. ‘Not one nation has ever achieved such a feat as the one achieved by the Russian nation under the leadership of Peter,’ wrote Kliuchevsky.³⁰ Only towards the end of the tsarist era did academic historians such as Paul Miliukov (1859–1943), working on the basis of extensive primary research on the economy in particular, dwell on the violence, the arbitrariness and the sacrifices, ‘the paucity of the results compared with the magnitude of the wasted resources’.³¹ Even in Miliukov's work and that of other late tsarist historians, Peter remained central to debates about Russia's place in the world and its destiny. Works of fiction, too, like Dmitry Merezhkovsky's Antichrist (Peter and Alexis) (1904–5) based on a metaphysical scheme involving the juxtaposition and clash of opposites – pagan and Christian values – represented the clash between Peter and Tsarevich Alexis as a battle for Russia.

After 1917 this emphasis looked set to change: the lives of the pre-revolutionary great and good, especially Russian tsars who had ‘exploited the masses’, surely would have no place in the new ideological framework, which stressed the collective over the individual, the common man over the monarch. Following the toppling of monuments to tsars, which we consider in our final chapter, in the late 1920s/early 1930s there were attempts to write ‘great’ men out of the narrative and replace them with economic forces and class warfare. The enormously influential historian and Party activist M. N. Pokrovsky (1869–1932) based his Marxist analysis of the ‘Petrine’ era on the rise of merchant capital, of which Peter was the agent. Peter himself was stripped of all heroism and charisma. Another influential historian, M. A. Rozhkov, identified the ‘gentry revolution’ as the key element, allotting little space to Peter himself, except to underline his crudeness. If some early Soviet historians made Peter less interesting, some avant-garde literature of the 1920s, when censorship was still perfunctory, cast aside all restraints to produce a grotesquely over-the-top image. Boris Pil'niak, for example, presented Peter as ‘an abnormal man, always drunk, a syphilitic, neurasthenic, who suffered from psychotic fits, fits of despair and violence, who strangled his son with his bare hands, a man absolutely without a sense of responsibility, contemptuous of everything, who to the end of his life failed to understand either the historical logic or the physiology of national life. A maniac. A coward.’³²

Both these trends were short-lived, as early Soviet pluralism was restricted and Stalin's regime embraced the exemplary lives, even the cults, of living and recently dead new heroes, together with the selective revival of some key figures from the more distant past. As Stalin said, ‘Marxism does not at all deny the role of outstanding individuals.’ Revived heroes from the past were carefully refashioned to meet ideological needs, to serve as role models for citizens or historical prototypes for party leaders. Stalin did not admire Peter as much as he admired Ivan the Terrible, but he appreciated certain parallels between Peter and himself. ‘When Peter the Great, who had to deal with more developed countries in the West, feverishly built works and factories for supplying the army and strengthening the country's defences,’ wrote Stalin in 1928, ‘this was an original attempt to leap out of the framework of backwardness.’³³ It was a commonplace of Marxist-Leninist thinking that Russia had to ‘catch up’ with (and eventually overtake) the West, whatever the cost. Hence Peter's reformed government, army and navy, factories and education were all to the good. In the Second World War the hero of Poltava and Hangö was harnessed to the cause. Most importantly, Peter's example seemed to demonstrate that people could be changed, but that in order to create new men and women, you had to get rid of the old. Of course, Marxist–Leninist historians were bound to denounce Peter's exploitation of the peasantry and praise popular rebels such as Bulavin. Peter's ‘cosmopolitanism’ was also roundly condemned. Cultural historians stressed native achievements over foreign borrowings. This bipolar view of Peter and his reforms prevailed for the rest of the Soviet era.

Oddly enough, it was difficult for Soviet historians to tackle the ‘bizarre’ phenomena of Peter's life because they were difficult to integrate and to reconcile with the rational, teleological approach to his reign as one of modernisation grounded in materialism and class interest, viewed with reference to Russia's fundamental needs in respect of the expansion of empire, international relations and economic, social and cultural development. When ‘anti-behaviour’ was mentioned at all in orthodox Soviet works, it was usually given a didactic interpretation: Peter was providing lessons, examples and models of how not to behave or exercises in satire, mocking and undermining the old and the traditional in the interests of modernisation. His ‘modesty’ and his ‘simplicity’ were taken at face value: he could be the ‘people's tsar’ (Lenin and Stalin enjoyed a similar reputation) at the same time as he chastised the people for their own good.

In the 1980s the old Soviet certainties began to crumble. Mikhail Gorbachev conceived his perestroika as broadly ‘Petrine’ in outline and a number of commentators in Russia and abroad spotted the analogies between Peter and Gorbachev as reforming leaders who ‘acted alone’. Gorbachev's visits to the West, his economic reforms, his borrowing of Western technology, even his ‘imitation’ of the dress and manners of Western statesmen, seemed to recall the opening of Peter's ‘window’ on Europe. Yet it was argued that, like Peter, Gorbachev was motivated less by concern for people than by love of empire and that his main goal was the preservation of the USSR's superpower status under the one-party state. He had no more intention of discarding Communism than Peter had of discarding autocracy. In respect of this analogy, Peter was the more successful of the two.

A contributory factor to the collapse of Communism in Russia was Gorbachev's new openness or glasnost, which gave rise, among other things, to new historical writing and attempts to fill in the gaps (in Russian, ‘white spots’) in the historical record. Although the most spectacular revelations related to twentieth-century Russia, there was also some new thinking about Peter's reign, notably with reference to certain negative parallels with Communist Russia which previously could only be hinted at. The St Petersburg historian Evgeny Anisimov characterised Peter as ‘the creator of the administrative-command system and the true ancestor of Stalin’, who laid the foundations of the totalitarian state, treating subjects like children with ‘the pedagogy of the cudgel’ in order to achieve progress in the name of the ‘common good’. He argued that Peter destroyed alternatives (‘civil society’), notably the church, and created the ‘well-regulated police state’ with its reliance on spying mechanisms and controls. Referring to the debate about capitalism in Russia, a central issue in the experimental economic climate of the 1980s, Anisimov argued that Peter weakened individual enterprise by increasing ‘the overriding role of the state in the life of society as a whole’. What was missing were competition and freedom.

Some of the most stimulating writing on Peter's reign produced in this period occurred in the work of semioticians of the Tartu school, led by Iury Lotman, who offered an approach to culture through the study of signs. Their Peter was not just a conventional military commander with exclusively practical goals, but a master of ceremonies, a leading actor or ‘player’ with the power to ‘toy’ with armies, fleets, towns and people. Wars, battles and sieges, diplomacy with its elaborate conventions and rituals, not to mention courtly life could be approached as masquerade, role play and theatricalisation; Peter's deference to Prince-Caesar was presented as a semiotic struggle, a polemic with the traditional Muscovite concept of how a true tsar should behave. Very much at odds with the rational, materialistic approach to history still favoured in official academic circles, at the time the work of the Russian semoticians probably influenced Western scholars more than their Russian counterparts.

It is significant that Lotman was based at Tartu in Estonia, a republic which enjoyed higher standards of living and more freedom of expression than the Russian heartland. In 1991 Estonia and the other Baltic states, which had been the main pickings of Peter's wars, declined to join Gorbachev's Commonwealth of Independent States and the USSR itself was swept away. How Peter himself has fared in post-Soviet Russia we shall return to at the end of our final chapter.