XII
In the 1840s a mad government clerk called Timofeev was arrested for climbing on to the Bronze Horseman statue and trying to knock the figure off the horse, on the grounds that he, Timofeev, was Peter I and the horseman was an impostor. Nicholas I asked to see the madman, who kept shouting ‘I want to sit on the bronze horse!’ Nicholas ordered a wooden horse to be made to look like the Falconet statue, painted bronze and taken to the hospital. Timofeev calmed down and spent many days sitting on the horse in the pose of Falconet's Peter.1
Paintings and statues: 1725–1917
No other Russian ruler has been depicted so often and commemorated over such a long period of time as Peter, whose familiar visage, the first consistently recognisable likeness of any Russian ruler, stares out from paintings, prints, illustrations, statues, busts, enamels, carvings, tapestries, artefacts, medals, coins, banknotes and, more recently, advertisements. Stalin and Lenin had more statues, paintings and memorabilia dedicated to them, but the phenomenon of ‘Leniniana’ and ‘Staliniana’ was short-lived, whereas the production of images of Peter continues to the present day. The proliferation of Peter's image owed much to the fact that his successors were anxious to present themselves as his heirs and also, in ways less easy to define, reflected his popularity (or notoriety) with different sections of Russian society. Visual representations, places where he lived and stayed, museums dedicated to him, objects which belonged to him or which he made, anniversaries celebrating landmarks in his life and career, have arguably contributed as much to his image over the centuries as the writings of historians, novelists and poets, but they have not been so systematically catalogued and analysed. They gave Peter a visible, palpable, but often ambiguous afterlife and make a fitting conclusion to our portrait of Russia's most influential and controversial ruler.
A striking early example was Rastrelli's wax figure, which, dressed in the suit that Peter had worn at Catherine's coronation in 1724, seemed to express silent approval of her succession. In its reincarnation as a museum exhibit it drew curious crowds, who were intrigued by the figure's uncannily lifelike qualities and by rumours that it contained a mechanism which allowed it to stand up and sit down. Rastrelli's 1723 bronze bust of Peter was perhaps even more influential in inspiring numerous copies in metal, marble and plaster for displaying in public places. In imperial Russia Peter's portraits stood or hung in places of honour in all the royal residences, copies (often bad ones) of well-known works painted from life by Caravaque, Dannhauer, Kneller, Kupetsky, Moor, Nattier, Nikitin and others rubbing shoulders with new compositions, which in turn were reproduced as prints for wider dissemination and to illustrate the copious literature, both factual and fictional, devoted to Peter and his reign. In his magisterial study of Russian engraved portraits D. S. Rovinsky devoted 778 entries to Peter, each with numerous subdivisions of portrait types. In the nineteenth century, artists and sculptors brought the Petrine era to life in historical compositions on such themes as the boy Peter discovering his first boat, Peter punishing the strel'tsy and the ever-popular Peter rescuing the sailors.
A systematic study of posthumous portraits of Peter is beyond the scope of this book, so let us focus on a selection of the more interesting ones. One of the most important was Jacopo Amigoni's large allegorical composition of Peter Victorious (1732–37), which hangs in the small throne room of the Winter Palace. The themes are war and victory: Peter looks self-assured, even self-satisfied, his booted right foot placed firmly on a mortar. To his right lie drums, to his left a pile of books rests on a map of a fortress, indicating conquests, while behind him stands Minerva/Victory holding a spear and gesturing at warships in the background, her head inclined admiringly towards the hero. Above the two figures, hovering putti place a laurel wreath on Peter's head. The painting, produced in the reign of Anna, contains an allusion to female rule (Anna/Elizabeth/Catherine as Minerva became a cliché), as well as to Russia's adulation of her manly protector, who watches over her still.
The most famous of all images of Peter must surely be Etienne Falconet's equestrian statue, unveiled in St Petersburg in 1782 and inscribed with the words TO PETER THE FIRST FROM CATHERINE THE SECOND in Russian and Latin, the first public monument to be erected in Russia. One of Peter's personae, as we have seen, was that of a sculptor, who takes a raw, shapeless block of stone and gives it form. In the Petrine discourse, the raw block was Old Russia (barbarism, disorder), the resultant beautiful statue New Russia (civilisation, order), which itself was Peter's monument. Falconet gave a brilliant twist to this discourse of imperial creative genius pitted against popular barbarism by incorporating an actual raw block of stone into his composition. The boulder known as the ‘Thunder Stone’ on which the horse stands, its shape also appropriately reminiscent of a wave, was said to be a rock on which Peter often stood to look out over the Finnish gulf. It took more than five months in 1769–1770 to drag it from the forest to Senate Square, a heroic feat of suitably Petrine proportions. The original rock, incidentally, was much rougher and cruder, but Falconet could not resist smoothing and polishing it.
For his horse and rider Falconet rejected the rather static ‘Marcus Aurelius’ model usually favoured for public monuments to conquering heroes and created a new type of iconography, more dynamic and technically daring. The serpent being trampled beneath the horse's hooves complemented the metaphor of the unhewn rock by suggesting opposition (cunning, malice, envy), with a hint of St George's dragon. It and the horse's tail also provided essential support for the rearing steed, which appears to stand only on its hind legs. Peter is dressed not in a Muscovite caftan or in contemporary dress, but in something allegorical, which Falconet rather vaguely characterised as ‘the clothing of all time, in a word, heroic clothing’. Falconet wasn't so good at doing faces. Peter's head, crowned with a laurel wreath, was modelled by his pupil Marie Collot, who worked from a life mask which Carlo Rastrelli took from Peter in 1719, to produce the slightly protruding eyes, pointed nose, and sharply outlined chin familiar from other sources.
At the unveiling in August 1782 canvas screens 12 metres high fell away and ‘the carved image of the immortal Monarch appeared as though rising from the bowels of the earth. … The Great Woman greeted the Great Man.’2 Cannon fire boomed out from the fortress and from ships on the river and troops fired guns and beat drums as the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky guards marched along the Neva embankment. Sons and grandsons of men who had seen the living Peter inspected his image and medals were handed out. Catherine, ever eager to confirm her own Petrine credentials, later wrote to her friend Friedrich Melchior Grimm: ‘He [Peter] was too far away to speak to me but he seemed to have an air of contentment which encouraged me to do better in the future if I could.’3 Probably more than any other work of art, the Bronze Horseman imprinted Peter's image, later filtered through Pushkin's poetic evocation, on the Russian consciousness.
Not everyone appreciated the statue's message of enlightenment. Some critics argued that Peter was forcing Russia to rear up, rather than to move forward. Taking a cue from Pushkin, whose poem brings the bronze ‘idol’ to life to pursue a hapless clerk, doubters have identified the serpent bent helplessly beneath the trampling hooves with the victims of power rather than the forces of reaction or evil, and the bearskin on which the horseman sits with the bear-like Russian peasants, crushed under the burdens imposed by tsarism. After Catherine's death her son Paul brought Rastrelli's equestrian statue of Peter, cast in 1744 then hidden away, out of storage and added the inscription TO THE GRANDFATHER FROM THE GRANDSON, 1800, with the intention of removing Falconet's monument and replacing it with Rastrelli's, which Catherine apparently hated. Assassination intervened, but Rastrelli's statue still stands outside Paul's former residence, the Mikhailovsky fortress.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sculptors favoured more realistic, if still idealised, historical detail, as in Mark Antokol'sky's famous statue, modelled in 1872, of Peter in the uniform of the Preobrazhensky guards and the three-cornered hat from Poltava, holding a cane in his right hand and a telescope in his left. He looks purposefully into the distance and prepares to step forth, the sense of motion emphasised by his wind-blown garments. The statue was cast in bronze for the grounds of Peterhof in 1883 and for the bicentenary (1898) of the founding of Taganrog, where it was unveiled in 1903. Copies were produced for further Petrine anniversaries and in 1898 an engraving of the head and shoulders appeared on the 500-rouble banknote
Its nineteenth-century equivalent on canvas was P. Delaroche's muchreproduced portrait of Peter the conqueror, his right hand resting on a cannon barrel and holding a sword which points towards a map of the Baltic spread out over a boulder on which Peter rests his left arm. His expression is confident, stern and manly, his figure much broader and better proportioned than in real life. (Peter's surviving clothes and shoes indicate that he had narrow shoulders and small feet.) Informal group portraits featuring Peter as shipwright and sailor – working in the docks at Amsterdam or Deptford, relaxing with foreign sailors and so on – were also popular in the nineteenth century and no less part of the myth than the many studies of Peter as war hero. J. B. Michel's engraving from a painting by Wapper (1858) of Peter with shipbuilders in Zaandam has Peter gestering towards a model of a ship, a book open on the table in front of him, which is strewn with mathematical instruments. Such images were didactic in tone and popular for illustrating Russian children's history books.
Petrine subjects painted abroad sometimes had a different agenda. The Irish painter Daniel Maclise's historical composition Peter at Deptford (1857), for example, is a testament to the Victorian enthusiasm for the dignity of labour. The brawny tsar-carpenter (his features based on Kneller's portrait) posing with sleeves rolled up ready to do some vigorous sawing is contrasted with the slightly puny-looking, velvet-clad figure of William III, who has come to pay a visit. The painting also illustrates some of the exotic elements in Peter's entourage, which aroused gossip at the time – a monkey (said to have jumped at King William), a dwarf, and one of Peter's mistresses. By and large, Russian painters eschewed such ‘unseemly’ details.
Only in the last decades of tsarism did a few artists refuse to glamorise Peter, drawing on contemporary accounts of Peter's ‘two faces’ which so fascinated writers like Merezhkovsky, for example, the Duc de Saint-Simon's memorable evocation (1717) of an appearance imbued with ‘intelligence, reflectiveness and grandeur’, which for seconds at a time and without warning would be disfigured by muscular spasms that struck fear into the onlooker, giving Peter a ‘wild and terrible air’.4 The successful portraitist Valentin Serov described Peter as ‘frightful-looking: long, on weak, spindly little legs and with a head so small in relation to the rest of his body that he must have looked more like a sort of dummy with a badly stuck on head than a live person’.5 His own reconstructions of the Petrine era included Peter the Great (1907), which captured brilliantly Peter's great loping strides and his grim determination to keep walking in the face of a St Petersburg gale, as servants and officials struggle to keep pace, and The Great Eagle Cup (1904), in which Peter leads a throng of courtiers, men and women, to one of his punitive drinking sessions.
These slightly irreverent studies co-existed with the thoroughly idealised images still favoured in official circles, which received a great boost from a string of Petrine anniversaries in the first decades of the twentieth century. The bicentenary of the battle of Poltava in 1909 inspired two more Antokol'sky copies, one in front of the Cathedral of St Samson (also a Petrine foundation), which was presented by two descendants of Peter's famous general B. P. Sheremetev, and another by the hospital of the Preobrazhensky regiment. In 1909–10 the historical compositions Peter the Great Saving Shipwrecked Fishermen and Tsar Carpenter, both commissioned by Nicholas II from the sculptor Leopold Bernshtam, were unveiled in front of the eastern wing and central arch of the Admiralty respectively.
In 1910 several Baltic towns conquered two hundred years previously received Peter monuments in affirmation of their continued allegiance to emperor and empire. The monument in Riga (Peter, it will be recalled, derived much pleasure from the city's capitulation) was especially formidable, an equestrian statue by the German sculptor Gustav Schmidt-Kassel set on a very high plinth. Evacuated before the advancing German army in 1915, the statue was lost in a shipwreck and raised from the bottom in 1934. The statue unveiled in Reval in 1910 was removed from its central site in 1922 when Estonia became independent, then reduced to just head and shoulders and subsequently melted down during the Second World War. One of the most chequered histories belongs to Bernshtam's statue of Peter in Viborg. In 1918, when Russia ceded Viborg to Finland, it was replaced by a Finnish independence monument, which the Red Army removed in 1940 to make way for Peter again, but in August 1941 the Nazis toppled Peter's statue, which lost its head. It was repaired and restored by the Soviets in 1954, its fate and that of its fellows illustrative of rival claims in the Baltic and the significance attached to monuments in the conflicting quests for imperial expansion and national independence. We return to the fate of other monuments later in this chapter.
Perhaps the most widely distributed of any of the late imperial images of Peter was a copy of Jacobus Houbraken's famous engraved version of Moor's 1717 portrait (allegedly Peter's own favourite), which appeared in 1912 on the new 500-rouble note. Set to the left of the note in an oval frame topped with a crown and surrounded by fanciful swags and elaborate columns (a deterrent to forgers), Peter's armour-clad image seems intended to reinforce confidence in the currency and provide a reminder of the roots of Russia's prosperity (suggested by the fecund-looking allegorical female figure representing Russia opposite) in the expansion of empire and military might which Peter sponsored. These banknotes were in circulation for only a few years before the Provisional Government and then the Bolsheviks replaced them with new symbols and images.
Peter's places
A number of buildings and sites closely associated with Peter acquired the status of virtual shrines, where patriots could pay homage and young people imbibe Petrine virtues. The first memorial museum was inaugurated by Peter himself, who had a keen awareness of posterity. In 1723, the same year that he transferred the ‘grandfather’ of the fleet from Moscow to St Petersburg and set it on a plinth, Peter ordered the construction of a protective casing around his first St Petersburg cabin. By the middle of the eighteenth century visitors to this ‘cradle of the Russian empire’ could view the bench on which Peter sat to admire his fast-growing city, his skiff, workman's tools and objects made by him. Peter's preference for small wooden houses was, of course, a component in the myth of his self-effacing modesty. The author of the first Russian guide to St Petersburg devoted several pages to an exposition of the theme of ‘Why such a Great Monarch should have chosen to dwell in such a small and wretched little house … which, however, little though it was, was more exalted than the splendid palace of Emperor Cyrus, the many-chambered mansion of Solomon and as worthy of honour as splendid Versailles.’6 The discourse of greatness achieved through humility dominated virtually all subsequent guides to the little house.
Pavel Svin'in, author of a pioneering early nineteenth-century description of the sights of St Petersburg, advised his readers to begin their city tour there, for ‘nowhere perhaps does this Great man appear more worthy of respect and wonderment than in this humble cabin. … From this hut he, the Conqueror of Charles, forced arrogant Europe to respect him.’ The cabin's very simplicity aroused a sense of deep reverence, fitting easily into the Sentimentalist/Romantic landscape and offering a lesson in aesthetics (the simple hut viewed against a picturesque background) as well as virtue.7 Visitors were advised to combine a visit to the cabin with one to Peter's little boat in its neoclassical boathouse in the Peter-Paul Fortress, commissioned by Catherine II in 1766, where a similar lesson about modest beginnings could be appreciated.
Nicholas I was particularly generous to the little house, funding a new brick outer casing, ventilation and drainage channels. An 1838 children's guide to St Petersburg detailed the response expected of those who entered:
Why does this structure of simple architectural design stand among all these splendid buildings? My friends, show reverence to this structure, for its walls conceal the little house of Peter the Great! We must remove our hats for we are approaching one of our country's holy places. … We cross the threshold and I see on your faces an expression of that holy rapture with which your pure, noble Russian souls overflow. You are struck dumb by the satisfaction of having the good fortune to be in the hut in which our immortal Peter lived.8
The children were admonished to kiss the boat which Peter made and to pray to the icon which he revered.
Peter's image was thus none too subtly refashioned to satisfy the requirements of Official Nationality (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, National Feeling), in which religious sentiment was a vital component. From Nicholas's reign onwards the cabin's focal point became the chapel in one of its rooms, which housed Peter's icon of the Saviour. ‘Hundreds of candles flicker before the miraculous image and indeed a marvel worthy of the Great Peter is accomplished,’ wrote the author of a much-reprinted guide to the cabin: ‘it is as if his humble dwelling were transformed into a holy church for all those grieving, embittered and seeking God's mercy.’9 Apparently a visit to the chapel was popular with students before examinations in April and May. In the words of a 1903 guide (the cabin was decorated for the bicentenary), the cabin was ‘dear to the heart of every Russian person’.10 Peter's modest example may not always have reflected well on his descendants, however. A 1914 handbook for rural teachers preparing their classes for a trip to the capital advised them to show their pupils a postcard of Peter's little house (many views were readily available for a few kopecks), drawing attention to its ‘modest dimensions’, then later to compare it with a picture of the Winter Palace. The visit to the little house was the recommended first stop. Later when they visited the Winter Palace, the author anticipated that some of the children themselves would make the comparison between the opulent residence and the simple cabin, but if not, the teacher was to do so.11
Some Petrine places were more elusive. In 1872 there was talk of erecting a monument on the spot where Peter died. But where was it? The old Winter Palace had been incorporated into the west wing of the palace extended by Catherine I, which in the 1770s was itself partly demolished and formed the foundations for Quarenghi's Hermitage Theatre. In the 1830s one A. L. Maier, whose mother had been born in the very same room (or a least that was what she was told), calculated that the ‘sacred spot’ was on the first floor in the second room along from the Neva on the corner of the Neva and Zimnaia Kanavka. A later investigator, using one of Quarenghi's plans, concluded that the study had disappeared, but that a portion of its outer wall, visible from the street, survived. A plaque was attached.12
A more tangible memorial site was Peter's tomb to the right of the altar in the Peter-Paul Cathedral, the first permanent version of which, as we saw, dated from Anna's reign. Lomonosov's project for a memorial in the form of mosaic panels to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Poltava in 1759 never materialised (only one Poltava mosaic was assembled and can be seen today in the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences) and the tomb remained more or less as it is now. The present white Italian marble sarcophagus was one of fifteen designed in 1865–67 by the architect A. A. Puaro and fitted with new metal plaques, after Alexander II discovered that the old tombstones under their fabric covers were unpolished and chipped. Doing homage at Peter's tomb was a must for visitors to the capital. Svin'in instructed his patriotic traveller to gaze at the cold stone, to recall the words of Prokopovich's funeral sermon and remember Peter's great deeds for the happiness and glory of millions, with feelings of love, respect and reverence.13 Children using the 1838 guidebook referred to earlier were commanded: ‘Get down on your knees, children, before the tomb of Peter and with hot tears let us bedew this monument and recall the deeds of the one who is hidden beneath this stone.’ Following Metropolitan Platon's example ‘we too ask him to rise up and view the achievements of his successors who try to imitate him’.14 ‘How many holy thoughts and reminiscences well up in the soul with a single glance at the sarcophagi, made from simple stone without any decoration and clad in brocade covers,’ wrote another guide.
Beneath them rest our crowned heads. Walking past a long row of graves of ordinary people one feels dejection and with involuntary sadness you look into the distance, at the empty plot which, perhaps, will receive your mortal remains; but standing above the tomb of the ruler of millions of subjects, who encompassed in his designs all the world, the father of the fatherland, you are struck by a strange sensation, which you experience fully but cannot express in words.15
Ordinary folk's encounters with dead great men were calculated to reinforce the natural order of things.
Over the centuries the tomb was decorated with trophies, standards, poems and medals. In the 1850s these included the flag from Chesme laid there by Catherine in 1770, an 1803 medal, the measuring icon of St Peter in a gold case and the bone chandelier made by Peter for the Martsial'nye springs in 1724. On the eve of the First World War a guide recorded four icon lamps, six medals (placed there for various anniversaries, including two in 1909), and seventeen silver wreaths. On the wall there was a bas-relief of Antokol'sky's statue in Taganrog. Much of this paraphernalia was swept away after 1917.
St Petersburg did not have a monopoly on Petrine shrines. In Voronezh, for example, in the early 1830s there was a proposal to convert the only building dating from Peter's time into a museum, filled with suitable furniture, portraits and other items (preferably belonging to Peter) and a book cupboard containing books about his life and times. On a nearby hill, cleared of the hovels which spoilt the view, an obelisk monument to Peter in a memorial park was planned, In 1834 the new house-museum complex was officially opened and a patriotic eyewitness was moved to enthuse about Petrine principles in his own time. Nicholas I, as he pointed out, came to the throne a hundred years after Peter's death:
In our imagination we were transported back to that time when just over a hundred years previously, amidst these very walls, on the order of the benefactor of the Fatherland Peter the Great work was in full swing and those wise undertakings which subsequently formed the basis of Russia's glory and greatness were being implemented. … My Russian heart was enflamed with a sensation of national pride and beat strongly at the thought that Russia, my fatherland, has attained such a level of greatness and glory of which one cannot find another comparable example in all History. Was there ever and will there ever be another State of such gigantic size, inhabited by millions of people, confessing a single faith, speaking one language, ruled by a single set of laws and obeying a single Sovereign?16
The project for raising an obelisk to Peter was halted by lack of funds, however, and only in 1860 was a statue unveiled of Peter leaning on an anchor with his left hand and pointing forward with his outstretched right arm.
One of the oldest of the surviving houses where Peter stayed was originally at Archangel. After suffering fire and storm damage in the 1760s, it was protected by boarded cladding in order to preserve the remains for posterity. It continued to decay, however, causing one patriot to deplore the fact that ‘in the chamber where this great man deigned to rest from his labours and devised ways of improving the welfare of his people, in that place where trophies should stand, now his ungrateful descendants allow senseless fourlegged beasts into this forgotten temple’.17 In the nineteenth century the wooden house was transferred to safer ground and in 1909 moved to the square in front of the cathedral for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the battle of Poltava.
At Poltava itself, the house where Peter stayed after the battle was demolished in the early nineteenth century and its site marked by an obelisk, as was the church of the Transfiguration built in 1711. In 1837, however, the older church of the Saviour, where Peter prayed, was preserved with stone cladding by order of the future Alexander II, taking a leaf out of his father's book. (One of the stops on his educational tour of Europe was the little house at Zaandam.) In 1849 the site of the house was marked by a more substantial monument with the inscription PETER I RESTED HERE AFTER HIS EXERTIONS ON 27 JUNE 1709 and a separate plaque ERECTED IN THE REIGN OF NICHOLAS I.
In Vologda the assembly of the nobility and town council restored another of Peter's small houses, which opened as a museum on 30 May 1872. People in their best clothes flocked to the cathedral where the bishop conducted a liturgy in Peter's memory. There was a military parade followed by a grand banquet in the noble assembly rooms, where a choir performed patriotic and religious songs and toasts were drunk to the imperial family, accompanied by the inevitable rapturous cries of ‘Hurrah’ and speeches about Peter's deeds. There is a postscript to this story. In June 1885 Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich visited the house. Accounts of this event give a vivid impression of the significance attached to royal visits in providing ‘outreach’ from the capital to the provinces and binding provincials closer in loyalty to the crown, in this case by the further sanctification of a ‘Petrine place’. To make a more specific link with the senior cabin in St Petersburg, they installed a copy of the icon of the Saviour. Thereafter, as in St Petersburg, a chapel was in operation in the house, apparently visited by huge crowds, especially on 30 May, 29 June and 28 January. On the first anniversary of the consecration of the chapel, the marshal of the nobility delivered a speech, which linked the loyal subjects of Vologda to the centre of empire and to other Russian towns through a shared history and shared concern for the preservation of historical memory and monuments.
The author of an article dedicated to the occasion thanked the Lord that the plan devised in 1872 had been brought to fruition, but now dreamed of acquiring one of Peter's uniforms, a sword and a hat for the museum. (One suspects that they were running rather short of genuine Petrine uniforms at this point.) On 29 June 1887, the Petrovsky Invalid Home in Memory of the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Peter the Great was opened in the building. The biography of Peter supplied in the handsome guides published in 1887 stressed that the common folk loved Peter because he had sanctified physical labour by working as a simple carpenter; intellectuals loved him because he founded schools; women because he emancipated them from their ‘servile position’; and so on. The heart of every genuinely Russian person was allegedly overflowing with inexpressible gratitude to the ‘Great Worker’, who by visiting Vologda four times showed that ‘he did not scorn even the most far-flung corners of Russia’.18
The literary treatment of Petrine places in the capital and outside demonstrated several dominant themes. Peter's shrines were ‘temples’ to his modest tastes, to hard work and self-sacrifice and in preserving them or visiting them his royal descendants showed their own ‘Petrine’ solicitude for the welfare of the great family of Russian people. Like Christ, who was born in a stable and brought up in a carpenter's cottage, Peter exalted himself by making himself humble. Even visitors to the Grand Palace at Peterhof were reminded that Peter preferred to stay in the more intimate Monplaisir, while at nearby Strel'na palace, equally grand but neglected, they were directed to the smallish wooden palace next door: ‘Here is yet another holy place, here is a precious relic of things which once belonged to Peter! Look upon this bed with pillows and cover, look upon this walnut cupboard in which stand the Dutch teacups of the immortal Peter.’19 In the grounds in the 1830s trees planted by Peter's own hands still grew, known as ‘Peter's nurslings’ and very carefully preserved. At the same time, the authorities did not hesitate to celebrate the imperial Peter, lover of grand victory parades. In 1833 Nicholas I commissioned Auguste Montferrand to design the Peter the Great Memorial Room (small throne room) in the Winter Palace, which as its centrepiece featured Amigoni's grand portrait behind a silver throne and at the sides paintings of the battles of Lesnaia and Poltava. The decorations included Latin monograms, crowns and thousands of double eagles against a background of red velvet. There were times when it was more appropriate to evoke the spirit of the great emperor on his steed than the modest workman at his lathe.
Peter's possessions
Besides portraits and sculptures, most of Peter's places displayed objects owned or made by Peter, which after his death were carefully preserved as virtual cult objects. Much survived in his own Kunstkamera in a section known as Peter I's Cabinet, where from 1732 Rastrelli's wax model seated on a simple throne presided over stuffed effigies of Peter's horse and dogs and assorted items of Petrine memorabilia – the worn boots, ‘whose decrepitude demonstrates this monarch's great thrift’, which were said to have been bought out of wages earned on a shift at an ironworks;20 stockings, allegedly darned by the monarch himself; the hat from Poltava shot through by a bullet; his lathes and some of the handiwork produced on them; mathematical instruments; and much more. Peter's collection of rarities and curiosities, including his preserved babies and two-headed sheep and Nicolas Bourgeois's stuffed effigy, were in adjacent rooms. His clothes, some 300 items ranging from richly embroidered tunics to linen underpants, were kept in the Marly palace at Peterhof. In 1848 Nicholas I ordered Peter's belongings to be collected together from various museums and royal residences and installed in the Peter the Great Gallery in the Winter Palace. An inventory made in 1865 indicates that the wax model, the stuffed horse and dogs occupied the centre, surrounded by portraits of Peter and his family and circle and some of his collection of Dutch paintings. Large objects such as a carriage, desk and lathes were also displayed.21
A special exhibition was held in 1903 for the bicentenary of St Petersburg, where visitors could see Peter's travelling medicine chest, his collection of extracted teeth, an ivory chandelier made by him, items of his clothing and his spectacles, chairs, dinner services, glassware and coins. There were gifts presented to him by various people – a cup from Catherine to mark the launching of a ship, an amber-framed mirror from Frederick William of Prussia – and gifts made by him for others, for example, a coconut with a gold rim with Peter's monogram and a Russian eagle (for the disgraced Prince Gagarin) and a snuffbox for Lieutenant Botov.
In 1909, Poltava year, complaints about the cramped premises and restricted public access to the Petrine collections in the Winter Palace prompted the creation of a special section in the old Kunstkamera. Two thousand two hundred and sixty-seven items were transferred to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, which opened its four-roomed memorial museum in May 1912. It included not only items from Peter's time but also later commemorative objects, such as models of the statues at Kronstadt and Poltava, a doll based on the landlady of the Zaandam house and two models of the house itself.
Petrine anniversaries
The paintings and statues, palaces and artefacts all came into their own on Petrine anniversaries, which in their turn prompted new visual tributes. Russia's rulers staged ceremonies around monuments to the tsar-reformer in order to denote their own commitment to enlightenment, modernity, military victory or whatever current policies required and to provide a focus for collective endorsements. Such celebrations, accompanied often by presentation booklets and souvenirs, were largely a creation of the later nineteenth century, Russia's version of the ‘invention of tradition’ centred on royal houses, although a few were observed earlier. The centenary of the founding of St Petersburg on 16 May 1803, for example, was marked by quite modest ceremonies, confined mainly to the centre of the city along the banks of the Neva and emphasising Russia's naval heritage. Ships, including Peter's little boat, and buildings were decorated with banners and pennants and there were illuminations at night. On the following day members of the Synod and Senate, on Alexander I's orders, laid a medal on Peter's tomb with the inscription: ‘Look down from on high, Great Man, and see how your descendants place on your ashes a sign of their grateful spirits. Your services [to your country] continue to bear fruit even from the tomb.’22 In 1811 the centenary of the battle of Poltava was marked by the building of a victory monument, an eagle on a high column.
Nicholas I was no doubt frustrated by the fact that no major Petrine anniversaries fell within his reign, but he commemorated his hero in any event. A statue at Kronstadt was unveiled on Poltava day (27 June) 1841. Celebrating the bicentenary of Peter's birth in 1872 fell to his son Alexander II. For Alexander, who had escaped an assassination attempt in 1866 and was experiencing a crisis of public confidence in his reforms, inviting comparisons with his tsar-reformer predecessor was a calculated risk which seems to have paid off. The celebrations in the capital on 30 May centred on processions linking together Petrine places and memorabilia. A 21-gun salute from the fortress signalled the start of the day, which began with delegations from city organisations and priests collecting the icon of the Saviour from the cabin, joining another line from the Trinity Cathedral and converging on the Peter-Paul Cathedral, where representatives of Peter's army and navy were lined up. Here on three gold cushions Peter's uniform, breastplate and hat, the sword from Poltava and his Order of St Andrew were laid out. A scroll bore an extract from his (probably apocryphal) speech to the troops before the battle. On another cushion lay a medal issued in Peter's honour which the emperor would place on his tomb after a requiem mass held there. Then a procession set off for the Nevsky gates and quay of the fortress; here a flotilla was waiting to escort the icon and memorabilia across the river to the festooned Bronze Horseman statue, where another religious ceremony took place.
The key roles in the ceremonies were reserved for the élite, but the intention was to involve and enthuse the ordinary public, who in St Petersburg were treated to a series of ‘popular readings’ on Peter with edifying pictures displayed to illustrate Peter's fearlessness and unselfishness, for example Peter standing up in a boat during a storm while all around his companions panic and the inevitable tale of Peter saving the drowning sailors. The bicentenary inspired events and publications all over the empire, highlighting the progressiveness of Peter's descendants and their fostering of Petrine virtues for the good of the whole nation. In Moscow the celebrations focused on the opening on 30 May of the great Politechnical Exhibition, which commemorated Peter's fostering of industry and technology, his encouragement of enlightenment and his hard work and dedication to duty. The ‘grandfather’ of the Russian navy put in an appearance, accompanied by the emperor's brother Grand Duke Constantine. Other towns with Petrine connections, such as Petrozavodsk, unveiled statues.
The first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a cluster of Petrine tercentenaries, a mixed blessing at a time when past glories proved useful for diverting attention from present crises and humiliations (notably the Russo-Japanese war), yet the reigning monarch, Nicholas II, was lukewarm towards his Petrine inheritance, preferring Moscow to St Petersburg. Even so, Nicholas responded positively to selected Petrine motifs, especially military and naval ones. His son Alexis was usually photographed wearing a sailor suit and was given his own ‘play’ regiment; this spawned a movement in schools and churches, where boys did military drill and gymnastics, sang patriotic songs and indulged in other activities, in imitation of the British Boy Scouts. In 1910 the magazine Play Troops (Poteshnye) was launched. All this was a cruel irony given that Alexis's haemophilia prevented him from being more than a token solder or sailor. For those of a pessimistic persuasion, the choice of name of Nicholas's only heir was also unfortunate, given the fate of Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich.
For the St Petersburg bicentenary in 1903 the city was decorated in the then fashionable baroque-classical revival style, with copious garlands and painted backdrops. Theatrical spectacles recreated the assemblies, balls and masquerades of Peter's time, and there were gatherings around the Bronze Horseman, tableaux vivants on Trinity Square and replica ships on the Neva. Voluntary organisations such as the Vasil'evsky Island Society of Popular Entertainments and the Board of Guardians of Popular Sobriety joined in to stage public events on the Field of Mars and other open spaces, where people could enjoy fairground amusements. Souvenirs on sale, some based on items produced for Queen Victoria's various jubilees, included pewter drinking cups featuring Petrine places (the little cabin, the Summer Gardens), and small brass busts of Peter with ‘1703–1903’ stamped on the base.
People all over the empire were expected to mark the capital's birthday. In the Tsar Alexander Gymnasium in Reval, the head of history A. V. Belgorodsky delivered a lecture to his pupils about ‘that true hero, that true epic warrior of the Russian land’, praising Peter's self-sacrifice and faith in God and stressing that the building of St Petersburg had been accomplished by the whole nation.23 A circular printed in Kazan' declared: ‘Now on the day of this most solemn anniversary, recalling with a sense of national pride the glorious historical past and the service rendered by Petersburg by implanting new European culture, the duma of the town of Kazan’, one of the oldest towns in Russia, sends greetings from the distant East to the capital city and warm wishes that it may long remain the centre of Russian culture, the focal point of the administrative and spiritual life of Russia.’24 Of all the Petrine anniversaries, the bicentenary of the battle of Poltava, 27 June 1909, received the most official backing, coinciding as it did with the apparent restoration of Romanov authority following the survival of tsarism after the 1905 revolution and the restrictions imposed in 1907 on the franchise and other liberties conceded in 1905–6. Nicholas II could relate more easily to Peter's military victories than he could to his Westernising reforms and lusty habits. Commemorative booklets described his visit to Poltava in lyrical tones. Even the sun knew its duty, it seems, ‘bathing the participants in its gentle rays, as the people greeted their Little Father Tsar’. On 26 June Nicholas reviewed the troops, mingling with officers of the Preobrazhensky guards, among them three descendants of officers who fought with Peter, and visited the communal graves of Russian victims. A new monument to Commandant Kellin, the defender of Poltava, was unveiled. On the 27th there was a service in the church of St Samson and a procession of the cross on to the site of the battle-field, accompanied by the ringing of church bells, the firing of guns and the beating of drums. In the afternoon there was a further ceremony at the eagle-topped Glory monument. This was as much Nicholas's day as Peter's. Official descriptions focus more on the enthusiastic reaction of the people to their Little Father, their responses ranging from tears of joy to rapturously powerful and mighty hurrahs, than on the historical events of 1709. In a speech the emperor underlined the need for all true Russians to support and love their tsar and serve their country and he expressed his faith in the people.
Not only in St Petersburg, where a number of celebratory volumes were printed by imperial command, but all over the country loyal presses vied with each other to sing the praises of Russia's past feats of arms. Typical of the material produced for display in public buildings were large illustrated wall sheets, at the centre of which, above a picture of Swedes surrendering, was an engraving of Delaroche's portrait of Peter, and above it a portrait of Nicholas II. The two tsars are surrounded by leading churchmen of the Petrine era and Peter's commanding officers to suggest the combined forces of state and church.25
Poltava was the first of a series of major anniversaries – Borodino (1812), the Romanov tercentenary (1613) and the battle of Hangö (1714) – which kept official Russia in a more or less permanent state of self-congratulation. The sense of tsar and people united which these occasions conveyed, in some cases genuine popular enthusiasm for the ceremonies in question, bolstered Nicholas's faith in his own popularity and in the power of a direct link with his people to overcome all obstacles. In the words of a booklet published in 1909: ‘The Japanese war and its grave consequences – that was our sin. At Poltava we repented and now we can boldly say that a strong, rich and populous Russia will be unconquerable for ever as long as it remains a believing, pious Holy Rus.’26 In 1914–17 such sentiments were to prove dangerous.
Soviet Peter
After 1917, when many effigies of emperors and empresses fell victim to the fury of urban mobs and Futurist iconoclasts, statues of Peter proved to be far from sacrosanct. The best-known victims of Lenin's 1918 Decree on Monumental Propaganda, which ordered the removal of monuments set up ‘in honour of tsars and their servants’, were the Moscow memorials to Alexander II and Alexander III, the toppling of whose heads symbolised the fall of tsarism. Less publicised was the removal of Bernshtam's Tsar Carpenter and Peter the Great Saving Shipwrecked Fishermen, both destroyed in January 1919, and V. V. Lishev's statue of Peter in front of the Arsenal, which was not saved by the fact that it had been sponsored by workers for the Arsenal's bicentenary in 1914. Other victims included a stone bust by an unknown author in the lower park at Strel'na, Ilia Gintsburg's 1911 bust of Peter in front of the church of the Holy Spirit in Greater Okhta (a district once inhabited by carpenters) and a bronze figure of Peter in working clothes with an axe at Strestroretsk. If acts of demolition during the civil war were sanctioned by revolutionary iconoclasm, in the late 1920s–1930s the industrialisation of the country supplied a pretext. A surviving copy of the Tsar Carpenter in the Summer Gardens was destroyed in 1930 for its metal content and several of Antokol'sky's statues of Peter were demolished, including the ones in front of the Cathedral of St Samson and the Preobrazhensky guards hospital. In the early Soviet period, when some radicals argued that on key national sites all buildings and monuments built more than ten years before should be destroyed, only monuments with something above and beyond a tsar's image, even Peter's, could survive. Falconet's Bronze Horseman, for example, owed its preservation to its unique design and technical ingenuity, as well as to its associations with Pushkin and the Decembrists. It became even more the symbol of Peter's (as opposed to Lenin's, from 1924) city in Soviet times as a result of the destruction or removal of all other outdoor monuments to Peter, with the exception of Rastrelli's equestrian statue.
The various Petrine museum collections survived the first decade of Soviet power more or less intact, but were inevitably caught up in the new thinking about museums and what was termed ‘the growing interest of the masses of the people in history’. Peter's cabin was placed under the protection of the new Museums Authority in 1918. In 1930 the chapel was ‘liquidated’ and the little house restarted life as a ‘valuable monument of material culture, an interesting monument of architecture characterising the initial stage of construction and life in the town’.27 Its presentation as a ‘military-camp structure’ was emphasised by the items selected for display – saws and other tools, draughtsmen's instruments and so on. This practical approach stripped the house of most of its associations with Peter as a personality. Peter's wooden house at Archangel was moved to Kolomenskoe (also a Petrine place), where it too functioned as a museum to labour. One guide claimed that it was the ‘direct predecessor of the cabin of Peter I in St Petersburg, better because it was built by local Russian masters’.28 Under the influence of M. N. Pokrovsky, it was decreed that separate commemorative displays dedicated to pre-revolutionary leaders were ‘alien to the spirit of the times’ and that exhibits should be distributed to different museums under such impersonal labels as ‘Feudal-Serf-Owning Russia’ and the ‘History of the USSR. XVIII century’.29 However, Stalin's slightly grudging approval of Peter prevented him from disappearing from the picture altogether.
Peter's places and statues came back into their own during the Second World War, along with other pre-revolutionary monuments and buildings. In 1941 mountaineers and steeplejacks camouflaged the steeple of the Peter-Paul Cathedral, which, as a Romanov mausoleum, had been neglected in the years following the revolution. The cathedral spire became the measure of the courageous defence of the city and inevitably evoked its creation ‘from nothing’. The Bronze Horseman survived the blockade behind wooden casing and sandbags. Apart from the difficulty of moving it, there was a legend that it must remain or the city would fall. In the words of a slim pamphlet published towards the end of the war:
In the days of the Great Fatherland War the significance of the statue to Peter I is especially evident. This most precious artistic treasure of Russia symbolises the immeasurable creative forces which lurk within her, the greatness of a state created by the Russian people and transformed by Peter. Recalling Peter's victorious struggle with foreign intervention, his monument unites the renowned glory of Russian arms and the military heroism of our own days. In the city which endured unprecedented sufferings and victories in 1941–44, the monument has remained unscathed amidst the dangers which threatened it. A strong case, reminiscent of a military defence, protected it from enemy shells and air raids during the blockade. Heroic Leningrad was able to defend the statue of its founder, just as it succeeded in defending its honour, freedom and historic fame.30
As the Nazis approached the city and threatened to raze it, Peter's first house became a potent symbol, too. In 1941 its contents were evacuated and a round-the-clock guard was mounted on the camouflaged building. Soldiers of the Soviet army departing for the front in 1944, took their oath there, vowing to fight just as heroically for the Motherland as Peter I's soldiers had fought.31 Despite suffering bombardments, it was the first Leningrad museum to reopen after the blockade.
In 1942 orders were given to repair and redecorate Peter's tomb in time for the October Revolution anniversary on 7 November, likewise the tombs in other parts of the city of Alexander Nevsky and Generals Suvorov and Kutuzov, which were all hurriedly tidied up and embellished as rallying points in the struggle against Fascism. A new display was designed, including a sculpted head based on Collot's study for the Bronze Horseman. New recruits came to the tomb, where they could read the words allegedly spoken by Peter to his troops before Poltava: ‘Of Peter know only that he sets no worth on his own life if only Russia and Russian piety, glory and well-being may live.’
The greatest impetus to the revival of Peter's reputation was undoubtedly the wanton destruction of so much of his heritage outside St Petersburg. In particular, the Nazis reduced the Grand Palace at Peterhof to rubble; its fountains and cascades were mined and surrounding pavilions, including Peter's favourite Monplaisir, were gutted. After the war their rebirth from the ashes became a potent symbol of Soviet Russia's regeneration. In the Hermitage an exhibition on Peter's Russia, including many items of Petrine memorabilia transferred there just before the war, opened in November 1947. The Summer Palace and Gardens reopened their doors to the public in the same year. Statues destroyed or damaged in the war, like the one at Voronezh, were repaired or recast and restored to their pedestals. The publication of Peter's letters and papers, which began in 1887 and halted in 1918, resumed in 1946 with a volume of notes for documents from the year 1708 (and currently has still only reached 1713). New museums opened on previously neglected sites, for example, in 1946 the Martsial'nye Springs open-air museum 54 kilometres from Petrozavodsk, incorporating the former church of SS Peter and Paul and a wooden pavilion over the springs, built in 1833. No trace remained of Peter's original ‘palace’ or spa buildings. The first exhibits included chairs with backs worked by Peter on his lathe alongside displays on the ‘self-sacrificing struggle of the Karelian peasants against the Swedish aggressors’.32 The spa was revived and in 1964 a sanatorium began to admit patients.
The parameters within which Peter could be depicted or celebrated were still restricted. On the one hand, he must not be praised too much (he had, after all, fleeced the peasants and been a little too welcoming to foreigners) and he was not as great as Lenin in the Soviet hierarchy of leaders; on the other, he was a Russian national hero and could not be denigrated or ridiculed. The tercentenary of Peter's birth in 1972 was, in the words of an American historian who witnessed it, ‘almost an event’.33 Celebrations were left in the hands of individual organisations, rather than the Party and Soviet authorities, who two years previously had pulled out all the stops to mark the centenary of the birth of Lenin in spectacular fashion. In Leningrad there were exhibitions in the Russian Museum (the most comprehensive ever staged on the portraiture of the Petrine period), the public library and the coffee house in the Summer Gardens. In Moscow, the Shchusev Museum of Architecture displayed contemporary materials on early St Petersburg and exhibitions were held in the Petrine halls of the State Historical Museum, the Kremlin Armoury, the cabin at Kolomenskoe, and the Tret'iakov Gallery. In general, the message was a positive one – Peter was a ‘man of his time’, which included serfdom, torture and other horrors, but he was also ‘progressive’, a predecessor of the Bolsheviks in his application of reason, sponsorship of science and technology and prioritising of the common good. As visitors to Peter's tomb in the 1970s–90s will recall, his was the only one among the Romanov graves to be regularly supplied with fresh flowers and marked out with a sculpted portrait and a military standard. The bipolar view of Peter remained the official one up to the collapse of the USSR, although in the works of a few bold historians Peter the first Bolshevik metamorphosed into Peter the first Stalinist.
Post-Soviet, post-modern Peter
In September 1991, just a few weeks after the abortive coup to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev which accelerated the rise of Boris Yeltsin and three months before the USSR formally ceased to exist, the inhabitants of what was then Leningrad voted in a referendum to restore the city's original name and on 7 November, hitherto devoted to the October Revolution, crowds gathered on Palace Square to celebrate. Speakers addressed the assembled crowds on such themes as the reopening of Peter the Great's ‘Window on Europe’ and the Petrine origins of the armed forces. Across the boat-filled River Neva in the Peter-Paul fortress a 12-gun salute was fired and flares were lit, both on the ramparts and on the lighthouses on the spit of Vasil'evsky Island, recalling the waterscape of Peter's time and his love of sailing, fireworks and loud explosions. Yet it was not all adulation, for together with new freedoms of expression and travel came freedom to demystify and debunk old heroes, a process from which Peter was not exempted.
In the 1990s a number of historians followed Anisimov's lead. Rejecting the received wisdom that Peter made Russia ‘leap forward’, for example, Iakov Vodarsky asserted that he actually put a brake on Russia's progress and created conditions for holding it back for one-and-a-half centuries, while Anatoly Lanshchikov called Peter ‘the Bolshevik emperor’, arguing that he decelerated Russia's development by accentuating those features – tyranny and servitude – that separated it from Europe, turning the whole country into one huge hierarchical GULAG.34 Other writers, deeply critical of post-Soviet politics and politicians, have emphasised not only Peter's cruelty and arbitrariness, but also the moral corruption of virtually all who served him, hence studies of Menshikov as the founder of the Russian Mafia. The following item was published in Moscow News in 1998:
In November the leader of Russia received an anonymous letter. ‘Reforms’, wrote the correspondent, ‘have led to corruption on a monstrous scale, to theft and crime throughout the country. Your inner circle, men whom you call your closest associates, men dedicated to the cause of reform (members of the high court, commanders of the armed forces and executive power, including even the leaders of your administration), firstly, have soiled their hands with bribe-taking; secondly, are guilty of embezzlement; thirdly, are implicated in protecting criminals and undermining the judicial processes.’
Readers were surprised to hear that the recipient of this letter, a few months before his death, was not Boris Yeltsin but Peter I. ‘Embezzlement on a huge scale right under the leader's nose, millions stashed away in Western banks, the incredible greed of the new elite! And we thought all this was just a feature of life today. It seems we just don't know the history of reform well enough,’ wrote the author.35
Another current in post-Soviet history writing responds to popular curiosity about the private lives of semi-sacrosanct figures of the past, unearthing previously suppressed information about their health (physical and mental), tastes, sexual orientation and family relations, a trend which extended even to such previously untouchable historical figures as Lenin, whose childhood, sex life and last illness were explored in lurid detail. With regard to pre-revolutionary monarchs, customer demand has fuelled a mini-industry in such compendia as The House of the Romanovs and other genealogies. Peter addicts have been catered for partly by reprinting works by pre-revolutionary writers such as M. A. Semevsky, A. G. Brikner and A. Waliszczewski and partly by articles in popular journals. One series in Science and Religion portrayed Peter as a sex maniac, who indulged in indiscriminate sexual relations with men and women, including his own sister Natalia and his niece the duchess of Mecklenburg. Elsewhere somewhat less sensational articles have examined the shadowy figures of Tsaritsa Evdokia and Anna Mons. New, more sympathetic treatments of Tsarevich Alexis (in Stalinist histories vilified as the figurehead of a band of ‘enemies of the people’, in later Soviet views a necessary sacrifice for the common good) include the film Peter and Alexis, which explores the father–son relationship from Alexis's point of view while stressing the agony of Peter's position.
By and large, the general public does not seem to have been much influenced by attempts to present Peter's unheroic side. In an opinion poll conducted by Radio Free Europe in 1993 to discover ‘Russia's most notable political figure’, Peter got 44 per cent of the votes with Lenin a poor second at 16 per cent,36 while in another poll conducted in Moscow in 1994 on the question ‘Which era of Russian history can Russians be most proud of?’ 54 per cent chose Peter's reign. (Stalin's was second, with about 20 per cent.) These results seem to have been prompted in part by popular longing for a strong man to intervene and take charge, but without the taint of the recent past, in part by popular perceptions of the Petrine era as a time when Russia was strong. ‘Peter helped to create the military-patriotic consciousness of the Russian people and shaped their attitude towards service, honour and dignity,’ declared the journal Armiia. ‘It is useful to remember this Petrine lesson today.’37 Interviews with ‘ordinary’ people reveal analogous views. Maxim, aged seventeen, told an American sociologist: ‘Peter had enormous strength of will; he slept only four hours a day, the rest of the time he gave over to work. Peter brought about a strengthening of the Russian fleet, won back some lands which belonged to Russia. It was a prosperous country then.’38 The continuing saga of the decay of the Russian armed forces and fleet only seems to increase nostalgia for Peter's time.
The public has been resistant to deviations from the standard Petrine iconography, the chief visual expression of which is a controversial statue by the Russian émigré sculptor Mikhail Shemiakin, set up in June 1991 right in the middle of the Peter-Paul fortress, which portrays the tsar as an ill-formed freak, unnaturally small-headed, bald, bug-eyed and spindly-limbed. It draws freely on Rastrelli's wax model (minus its wig), which Shemiakin often saw in his pre-emigration days working as a porter in the Hermitage (a ‘bearer of culture’, as he joked) and also on unflattering descriptions of Peter by his contemporaries. The inscription echoes Catherine II's dedication on Falconet's monument: TO THE FOUNDER OF THE GREAT RUSSIAN CITY EMPEROR PETER I FROM THE ITALIAN SCULPTOR CARLO RASTRELLI AND THE RUSSIAN ARTIST MIKHAIL SHEMIAKIN. The seated figure always attracts a cluster of onlookers, not least because a legend has grown up that if you touch the model's index finger your wish will come true. Shemiakin himself has expressed satisfaction that his work has created a new St Petersburg legend. Tourists like to be photographed next to it, although the more traditionally minded can have their pictures taken just a few paces away with a live Peter look-alike in guards uniform.
The wider context of Shemiakin's work is the exploration of the ‘laughter culture of Old Russia’, carnival and the modern avant-garde, a principle which he has also expressed in a new monument to Peter by the Thames at Deptford, London, unveiled in June 2001. There were rumours that the sculptor's initial idea of surrounding the tsar with jesters displaying their bare bottoms was vetoed by the organising committee as incompatible with the aims of the Peter the Great Foundation set up to help young people in south London, for whom hard-working Peter is held up as a role model. Staff at the London embassy's reception for Russian National Day, a week after the unveiling, were keen to dissociate themselves from the new monument, which they found too stylised, too modern; the face was not an accurate likeness of Peter, ‘whom every Russian can recognise’. Similar opinions have been expressed about the St Petersburg statue: it offends because it does not resemble the Peter whom people think they know. Peter the man of many faces, masks and disguises, Peter the freak, has not really gained currency.
Guides and curators in the many museums with Petrine associations continue to take an admiring and reverential view, while being aware that there is another. ‘Peter was a complex character,’ admitted the guide at the end of a recent tour of the Summer Palace. Then, after short pause, ‘But he did a lot for Russia, perhaps best of all creating St Petersburg.’ An exception was a curator who had worked for many years at Peterhof and ventured the view, on a private tour, this time, that Peter suffered from mental illness and psychoses. In his opinion, Peter's various joke fountains in the park, which drench the unwary, and the replica of a great eagle cup among the exhibits in Monplaisir palace were no laughing matter, but rather examples of Peter's perverted sense of humour and disregard for human dignity. He was nenormal'nyi.
Carnivalesque Peter and mad Peter appeal to a small minority, but traditional Peter – hero, worker, teacher – is more in evidence than ever. A copy of Bernshtam's Tsar-Carpenter, cast from a version in Amsterdam, has been restored not far from its original place on the Neva embankment in front of the west wing of the Admiralty. Even more striking, in the busy entrance hall of the Moskovsky railway station on Insurrection Square a statue of Lenin has been replaced by a large copy of Rastrelli's bronze bust of Peter on a plinth. Whereas in the old days people made arrangements to meet ‘by Lenin’, now they meet by Peter, who greets visitors arriving in his (no longer Lenin's) city. Meanwhile, inside the Peter-Paul Cathedral, just a short walk from Shemiakin's statue, Peter's tomb is draped with the flag of St Andrew (now restored to the ships of the Russian fleet) and covered with copies of medals. Next to it the small sculptural group Deposition from the Cross by the Italian sculptor Zorzoni is back in its place. Brought to St Petersburg in 1717 as part of a job lot for display in the Summer Gardens, at some point after Peter's death it was placed in the cathedral, allegedly on Peter's orders, and was transferred to Peter's tomb in 1872, but removed in 1972 to the storeroom of the Museum of the History of St Petersburg. (New scholarship on the foreign artists who created the religious art in Peter's cathedral is being published.)
The relatively new art of Russian commercial advertising also utilises Peter's image in various ways, for example, to suggest strength and authority. Peter himself never got round to founding banks, but advertisements for the Menatep Bank (‘a strong bank for a strong country’) feature Peter's portrait and the Petrovsky bank on Nevsky Prospekt has a bust of Peter over its entrance. The pack of top-selling ‘Peter I’ cigarettes (which, of course, Peter never smoked, although he enjoyed a pipe) gets the message across to millions: ‘These unique cigarettes of highest quality have been created using superior types of tobacco which were purveyed to the court of Peter I from Europe and are capable of satisfying the most discriminating connoisseur who believes in the revival of the traditions and greatness of the Russian land.’ The ‘Peter I’ logo, with its double-headed eagle on a black background is everywhere – on awnings, posters, parasols on street cafés, cars. Other cigarette packs also display Peter's portraits. This sort of advertising is not new. In prerevolutionary Russia, ‘Imperatorskie’ cigarettes were popular. Petrine associations are used (along with images of Old Russia and an idealised Russian countryside of butter-churning milkmaids) to promote other Russian products: ‘Petrovskoe’ beer, with its Bronze Horseman logo, made at the Stenka Razin factory in St Petersburg, is one of several brands in competition with foreign beers and lagers, and ‘Peter the Great’ original Russian vodka made in St Petersburg ‘of the finest grain spirit and pure natural soft water’ features the head and shoulders of Nattier's portrait in a medallion surrounded by weaponry over a ribbon in the new Russian national colours. Commercial interests can use the patriotic Peter, urging self-sufficiency and preferring wholesome Russian products, or Westernising Peter, encouraging new technology and Western fashions.
Peter's enhanced status as local St Petersburg hero is hardly unexpected, but Moscow, too, has taken advantage of the lucky (some would say unlucky) coincidence of a series of Petrine anniversaries to raise Peter's flag on its own mast and pre-empt some of the forthcoming St Petersburg-based celebrations for 2003. As Moscow's Mayor Iury Luzhkov wrote in the preface to the catalogue for the Kremlin exhibition ‘Peter the Great and Moscow’ (1998), here were born ‘the schemes of Russia's future transformation’: the fleet was founded, the Grand Embassy set off and the first victories of the Northern War were celebrated. In their foreword the directors of the participating museums expressed the hope that the exhibition, which brought together more than 400 exhibits, would help boost confidence in the ‘Great Future of our Fatherland’.39
Moscow now also boasts the biggest Peter the Great statue in the world, Zurab Tsereteli's 98-foot Monument to the Tercentenary of the Russian Fleet. It stands on its own small island in the river, to the west of the Kremlin, and is linked by a short walkway to the bank in front of the Red October sweet factory, but in 2001 no one walked across to sit on the attractive benches around the monument's base, since public access was barred following threats to blow it up by neo-Bolsheviks protesting against monuments to tsars. Instead of the usual plinth, Peter is standing on a galleon (which he dwarfs) which is supported by an ornate structure of piled-up prows bearing metal wind-vanes in the shape of the St Andrew's flag. Peter stands erect, turning a ship's wheel with his left hand and brandishing a rolled-up map in his right. The face is recognisably his, but this has not appeased the monument's critics.
Muscovites have protested about the cost (an estimated $11 million), the inappropriateness (Peter hated Moscow), the lack of consultation and the ugly intrusiveness of the towering ensemble. They also object to being fobbed off with a second-hand design, for if Peter's clothes look a bit more fifteenth-century than eighteenth – strange armoured shoes and a sort of doublet – this may be because the monument was based on Tsereteli's design for a giant statue to Christopher Columbus, which now stands in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where locals apparently call it ‘Chris Kong’. To its detractors, Peter-Columbus seems to be crushing the ship beneath him (a reference to the crushing burdens imposed by Russia's leaders), while the map in his right hand looks like a human bone, hinting at cannibalism: Peter devours Russia. In general, the statue's size and ostentation recall the worst excesses of the Soviet predilection for gigantic monuments of ‘Egyptian’ proportions. Many regard it not only as part of the ‘Tsereteli-isation’ of Moscow (the much-decorated Zurab – People's Artist, Academician, Laureate, President of the Academy of Arts etc. – is the author of numerous high-cost projects, including fairytale fountains in Manezh Square and the Poklonnaia gora memorial complex on the out-skirts) but also as a gross example of Mayor Luzhkov's plan to impose his own vision on the city and to create a pedestal for himself. In honouring Peter, Luzhkov may also have been honouring Boris Yeltsin, who repeatedly declared himself an admirer and emulator of the first emperor. Luckily for the mayor, Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, is also a fan of Peter's brand of firm government from above. St Petersburger Putin is even planning a new presidential residence in Peter's palace at Strel'na.
For the new establishment, the Moscow monument has a positive message; its iconography evokes the idea of a voyage of exploration, of Peter the discoverer of new lands steering the New Russian ship, a metaphor for farsighted leadership from above. Peter looks towards the West, the inspiration for much of Luzhkov's new Moscow. At the same time the monument arouses nostalgia for a lost empire. On 6 September 1997 the St Petersburg News announced:
Yesterday at the opening of the monument there was much talk about Russia's place in the modern world, about its power and lost position, its glory and its future. The speakers, major figures of the Russian state and country's fleet, emphasised that Russia's independence and its security are impossible without the strengthening of its naval traditions, which were begun three centuries ago by the young Peter.40
In this respect, it is ironic that one of the (unverified) explanations for the tragic sinking of the submarine Kursk in August 2000, in which 118 submariners perished, was that it was hit by a shell from the Peter the Great, the biggest ship afloat in the Russian navy, part of a discourse which blames the country's rulers for indifference to the fate of ordinary citizens. In the popular imagination, as we know, Peter is associated with saving men from drowning and, it is said, would have rushed to the site of the disaster in the Barents Sea to help in the rescue operation.
Tsereteli's monument is interestingly juxtaposed with other post-Soviet monuments. To the north rises New Moscow's most grandiose restoration project, the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, which can accommodate 10,000 worshippers. The original, blown up on Stalin's orders in 1931, was founded in 1839 by Nicholas I, Peter's great admirer, to fulfil the pledge of Alexander I to erect a memorial church to the victims and heroes of the Napoleonic wars. One of the best views of the Peter monument can be had from its roof gallery. If you approach the statue from Krymsky Val to the south-west, walking past the exhibition halls, it appears at first to be part of the open-air sculpture park popularly known as the ‘graveyard’ of Communist monuments, although in fact it is separated from it by a road and the river. After the collapse of the USSR, many redundant statues were brought here and laid on their sides, sometimes in several pieces, including the toppled monument to Feliks Derzhinsky from opposite KGB headquarters on Lubianka Square and several statues of Stalin. Admirers of Peter could think of him rising triumphant above the fallen idols of the failed Soviet experiment. More recently, however, some of the Soviet statues in the park have been raised, causing people to muse on the fact that Russia can never get rid of its leaders, or its attachment to strong leaders, who have a nasty habit of coming back to life just when you think they are dead and gone.
Moscow's contemporary symbolic landscape contains many such references and allusions to times and places outside itself, a vital element in its reconfiguration and reinvention in the 1990s both as capitalist city and as city of Orthodoxy and heritage, as religious replicas resurrected from the past rub shoulders with genuine monuments in a landscape of shopping malls, McDonald's and Pepsi Cola signs. It was Peter who opened up Russia to their early eighteenth-century equivalents, creating his own New Russians and his own model city albeit in another location, so it is not surprising that the chronological correspondence of Russia's latest reinvention of itself to events of Peter's time three hundred earlier has led to the late twentieth/early twentyfirst century being dubbed a new Petrine era without the military victories.
Poets have often used the image of the Bronze Horseman, looking down from his pedestal at the new life going on around him, and even climbing down to explore it, to suggest questions about Russia's past and future. In Vladimir Maiakovsky's poem ‘The Last St Petersburg Fairy Tale’ (1916), Peter, the horse and the serpent climb down from their rock and go to the nearby Astoria hotel (where someone apologises for stepping on the serpent's tail), but are forced to return to the places allotted to them for all time. The last lines evoke the dejection on the horse's face and the frustration of Peter, an emperor ‘without a sceptre’, at being a prisoner fettered in his own city. A modern poet has the horseman casting a ‘gloomy look’ at a girl in jeans (recalling his first meetings with his Kate) and asking what the hell's going on as he scans the banks, exchanges and down-and-outs (banki, birzhi, bomzhi) and longs to leap down from his ‘dead horse’ as he contemplates the approach of the twenty-first century.41 No doubt Tsereteli's giant Peter will similarly be brought to life to walk the streets of the city which he never much cared for and to discover that almost three centuries after his death no one has replaced him as the pivotal point for discussions about Russia's past and future and that many of the issues he grappled with still await a resolution.