Peter the Great

12 Key excerpts on "Peter the Great"

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  Between East and West

  The Origins of Modern Russia: 862–1953

  • R. D. Charques(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Pegasus Books

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VIII THE LEGACY OF Peter the Great

  THE REIGN of Peter the Great is the watershed of modern Russian history, the great divide between Muscovy and imperial Russia, the iron bridge between the harsh paternalism of Moscow and the harsher regimentation of St Petersburg. It brought a semi-Asiatic and medieval state into fruitful but shallow contact with the civilization of the west and established Russia among the great powers of Europe. As the architect of the empire of the tsars and an example for the age of Stalin Peter is the most significant ruler in Russian history.

  Insecurity attended his accession to the throne. Tsar Alexis died suddenly in 1676 at the age of forty-seven. By his first wife, Maria Miloslavsky, he left two sons, Fedor and Ivan, aged fourteen and ten; by his second wife, Natalia Naryshkin, the four-year-old Peter. Both Fedor and Ivan were sickly, the one half-paralysed and the other almost blind and witless; the boy Peter enjoyed abounding health. Even while Alexis lived the Miloslavsky and Naryshkin factions had been at bitter odds in rivalry for the succession. With the due acclamation as tsar of Fedor the Naryshkins were driven unceremoniously from court and Peter and his mother relegated to a safe distance. Fedor died six years later. In the midst of continued sordid faction the signal event of his brief reign was the formal abolition of the obstructive system of mestnichestvo.

  By all the unformulated rules of succession the throne was now Ivan’s. But the Miloslavskys had made lively enemies at court and in the Church, and these, attempting to dispense with the formality of an assembly of the land, hastened to proclaim Peter. At this point there appeared on the scene the formidable Sophia, Ivan’s sister, a shrewd, ambitious, plain-featured woman with a cultivated prince charming, Prince Vasily Golitsyn, for lover. Sophia had recourse to the Streltsy

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  Russia

  A Historical Introduction from Kievan Rus' to the Present

  • Christopher J. Ward, John M. Thompson(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Those in government circles and among the old boyars and conservative churchmen who opposed Peter’s policies hoped to use the heir to the throne, Peter’s son Alexis, as the spearhead of their discontent. Intelligent but weak-willed and dissolute, Alexis, under pressure from Peter, renounced his right to the throne. Soon afterward, he went into self-imposed exile abroad. He was finally persuaded to return to the empire, but before long, his name was linked to plotting against Peter. Relations between father and son had never been good, and now Peter acted willfully against Alexis. In 1718, a broadly composed, extraordinary tribunal sentenced Alexis to death, but shortly thereafter, he died or was murdered in prison. Five years later, Peter promulgated a new succession law, declaring that the tsar had the right to name the heir to the throne, but he died in 1725 without doing so.

  Conclusion

  Within fifty years of Peter’s death, some writers were arguing that his reign had greatly benefited the Russian Empire, while others claimed that it had ruined the country. This controversy became a major issue during the 1840s, when a debate arose between the Westernizers, who approved of Peter’s policies, and the Slavophiles, who denounced them.

  Peter’s reign can best be summed up as a series of paradoxes that help explain why it is so controversial:

  • Peter coerced the Russian Empire into an era of modernization that was already coming to Russia.
  • Peter had a vision of a more efficient, modernized empire, but his reforms were often haphazard, forced on him by military necessity and the pressure of events.
  • Peter wanted to drive barbarism out of the state but relied on barbaric methods to achieve that goal.
  • Peter wanted to change and improve society but left it with serfdom, an entrenched, privileged nobility, and a cumbersome and often corrupt bureaucracy.
  • Peter cared about the welfare of his people, but his wars and fiscal demands left them burdened, exhausted, and resentful.
  • Peter sought good government and encouraged individual merit, but his reign heightened the arbitrary power of the state.
  • Peter set a fast pace and employed coercion to make progress, but this practice alienated most people and undercut the changes he was trying to make.
  • Peter made the Russian Empire a great power in Europe, but he achieved this through aggression against its neighbors and at great cost to the empire itself.

  In evaluating Peter the Great, there are three major conclusions concerning his reign. First, he was clearly one of the most influential personalities in modern history. While the Russian Empire undoubtedly would have entered modernity, Peter greatly accelerated the process and, in so doing, changed imperial society fundamentally. Second, Peter propelled the empire onto the European stage and made it a great power. Finally, Peter forced the population to face some fundamental questions: How could imperial society react to new ideas and technology and still be true to its own traditions and unique culture? Should the West be imitated, or could Western attitudes and methods be modified and adapted to serve local needs and interests? Was it possible to fuse local beliefs and Western thought? And finally and most fundamentally, what was the true essence of Russian, Ukrainian, and the other Slavic and non-Slavic civilizations that existed during Peter’s time?

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  The Making of Russian Absolutism 1613-1801

  • Paul Dukes(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER THREE The new structure: Peter the Great, 1689–1725

  The most renowned part of the making of Russian absolutism is that associated with Peter the Great. One of his early publicists put forward a view of the tsar reformer pulling uphill single-handed while millions dragged down, thus contributing to an image of the man that persists widely today. For example, an American art critic looking at ‘Treasures from the Kremlin’ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York writes: ‘Through Peter the Great the country moved from the Medieval world to the Age of Enlightenment in a single, painful move.’1 In fact the movement associated with Peter the Great, while undoubtedly painful, was also complex and several-sided. If he did indeed open the ‘Window on the West’, the questions must still be asked: what kind of window, from what manner of building, and on to which aspects of the West? and how did Peter’s movement relate to others before him and after? For his proclamation of the Russian Empire at the end of the Northern War was both a culmination and a beginning, an arrival and a departure.

  This was in 1721, when Peter was nearly fifty years old, and only four years or so from his death. His might was not widely recognised before 1721, and he served a long apprenticeship before becoming a master tsar. His life and his reign both commenced without much intimation of future ‘greatness’, and with quite a few pointers towards a different appraisal or to no appraisal at all. And so we must give considerable attention to the early years, to those before 1698, when the shape of things to come was first clearly adumbrated after Peter’s return from his first visit to the West, and before 1696, when he himself declared that he had begun state service in earnest after the taking of Azov, and even before 1689, when the opportunity was initially presented to him to assume command with the fall of the Regent Sophie.

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  Power in Stone

  Cities as Symbols of Empire

  • Geoffrey Parker(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  9 St Petersburg and the Imperial Vision of Peter the Great

  A quarter of a century after the transfer of the French seat of government to its new home in Versailles, on the other side of Europe another grand project with a very similar objective was getting under way. This was the foundation of the city of St Petersburg which took place in 1703. Located at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland on the deltaic estuary of the river Neva, from the outset it was intended by its founder, Tsar Peter I , ‘the Great’, to be the new capital city of the Russian Empire.

  Peter reigned from 1689 to 1725. He was therefore a slightly younger contemporary of Louis XIV of France and, like the French monarch, he had visions of greatness for his country. These, however, entailed a far more radical transformation than had ever been the intention of Louis. Although Louis built a completely new seat of government, it was very close to Paris, which had been the capital of France since the country came into existence. The basic geopolitical structure of the French state remained largely unchanged and France continued to be ruled from a seat of power at the centre of the Paris basin. Peter, however, was responsible for the complete transformation of the geopolitical structure of Russia.

  Peter was the greatest modernizer in Russian history, and he saw his role as lifting his backward-looking country out of the Middle Ages into the eighteenth century. Europe was undergoing a massive transformation in virtually all fields and by the later seventeenth century this transformation was most in evidence in the countries of northwestern Europe, in particular the Netherlands and England. Peter desperately wanted Russia to be a part of this but he realized that nothing could be accomplished without massive changes. The establishment of the new capital was without doubt his most important step in bringing this about.

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  Stanlinism

  • Nick Lampert(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Peter the Great (1689-1725) pursued similar foreign policy objectives to those of Ivan IV, but with greater success. The threat from the south - from the Crimean Tatars and their Turkish backers - was contained, while victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700-21) secured Russian expansion on the Baltic, symbolised by the foundation of the new capital, St Petersburg. Peter built up the Russian army and navy, with the help of new technology as well as personnel imported from the West. To supply the armed forces with metal, a great new iron industry was developed in the Urals. Much of the workforce for this industry, and for construction projects such as the building of St Petersburg, comprised the forced labour of peasants, who bore increasingly heavy burdens of serfdom and taxation. In Peter's concept, the whole of society, including the nobility, had to serve the state. The boyar council was abolished, and Peter ruled directly with advisers appointed by himself. The creation of the Table of Ranks in 1722 further weakened the hereditary aristocracy by making state service rather than birth alone the main qualification for social status.

  Peter and his achievements were greatly admired by proponents of the eighteenth-century Russian Enlightenment, and in the early nineteenth century he was a hero both to the conservative adherents of Official Nationalism and to the more radical Westernised intelligentsia. The Slavophiles, by contrast, provided a Romantic critique of the Petrine reforms, which in their eyes had destroyed the organic harmony of Muscovite culture by introducing alien Western values of rationalism, legalism and compulsion. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Solov'ev defended Peter for his contribution to the growth of the Russian state, while his pupil V. O. Klyuchevskii provided a more nuanced assessment, bringing out the contradictions in Peter's achievement. The liberal historian P. N. Milyukov was even more critical, stressing the wastefulness and cost of much of Peter's activity, and condemning the compulsory methods by which the reforms were imposed. Some of these themes were continued by Pokrovskii. In his view Peter's use of forced labour and insistence on state regulation of the economy limited the growth of commercial capitalism and led to the collapse of much of the new industry soon after Peter's death.7

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  Adventures in Russian Historical Research

  Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present

  • Samuel H. Baron, Cathy Frierson(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  When asked in a published interview to select a hero from Russian history, President Boris Yeltsin named Peter—a choice which once again, polls now indicated, enjoyed broad popular support. Acclamation has succeeded reclamation, it seems, however misguided or excessive it may sometimes appear. Meanwhile the massive scholarly edition of Peter’s letters and papers, inaugurated in 1887, continues publication in Russia and new scholarly editions of other primary sources and of pre-Soviet works have appeared; so have numerous new monographs and interpretive studies as well as a major new biography. 6 A biography of similar if not greater scope has also been published in the West, where dissertations on Petrine subjects and other specialized studies have also appeared or are in progress. 7 This efflorescence of scholarly interest suggests a renewed recognition of the fact that major historical events and figures, those which directly impacted the lives of millions, cannot permanently be ignored or downplayed in service to prevailing historiographical fashion without doing serious damage to historians’ basic credibility. Figures and events like the reforms of Peter the Great, in other words, must be periodically reinterpreted in the light of current values and by whatever methods now seem appropriate; they cannot simply be wished away or left to the tomes of a bygone era if historiography itself is to remain alert, convincing, “relevant.” In this respect, at any rate, this one student’s investment in certain aspects of the Petrine era seems to have been time well spent. But I’m also pleased to think that all of the renewed interest in Petrine subjects, which will surely intensify in 2003 with the tercentenary celebrations of Peter’s founding of St. Petersburg, constitutes a very salutary reminder of Russia’s huge, indeed measureless, European heritage

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  Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church

  • Arthur Stanley(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  L E C T U R E XII Peter the Great AND THE MODERN CHURCH OF RUSSIA It is needless to specify the works on the Life of Peter the Great. A catalogue of the chief of them will be found in the preface to the com-pendious Life of Peter the Great in the Family Library. The more special authorities for his ecclesiastical history are mentioned in the notes. I mast, however, particularly notice the Russian documents translated in The Present State and Regulations of the Church of Russia, by Henry Consett, chaplain at the British Factory, 1727. IF the history of the first Russian Reformer suffers from our ignorance, the same cannot be said of the second. If no one has heard of Nicon, every one has heard of Peter. Let us first briefly recall his general character and career, and then transplant him into the special field of history, that of the Eastern Church, with which we are too little accustomed to associate his name. I. Much as has been said and written of Peter the Great, yet there is a singularity in his position which always provokes afresh the curiosity of mankind. The second founder of the youngest born of European Empires, he gathers round himself all the romantic interest of a legendary hero, an Alfred or a Charlemagne; yet he is known to us with all the exactness and fulness of recent knowledge. No prince of modern Europe is so familiar to almost every country in it, as Peter of Russia. He was, as no other prince has been, a guest of each. Holland, Sweden, Poland, Turkey, Prussia, Austria, Italy, knew him well by sight or hearing as he passed to and fro on his marvellous journeys. He is ours, too, in a special sense. All London was alive with expectation and excitement when his arrival in England was known. Every one was full of stories of the artifices by which the strange barbarian sought to evade the eagerness of our national curiosity to see the prodigy.

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  The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture

  • James Cracraft, James CRACRAFT(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  1 introduction Historiography We begin with a brief review of the historiography of Peter the Great, which has been the subject over the years of extended critical inquiry. 1 Our purpose here is only to sample, by way of setting the scene, the most important general works in Russian, to which the major works in other languages, with respect again to our concerns, have little or nothing to add. 2 Numerous specialized monographs dealing with particular aspects of what I have termed the Petrine revolution in Russian culture have appeared, to be sure, and will be cited where appropriate in this and the succeeding chapters. But no comprehensive, fully documented cultural history of the Petrine period has yet been pub-lished in any language. Indeed that has been the goal of my project. The several weighty volumes on the Petrine era compiled by S. M. Solov’ev, who has been called “probably the greatest Russian historian of all time,” are an appropriate place to start. 3 Solov’ev seems to have coined the term “Petrine revolution [ petrovskii perevorot, sometimes revoliutsiia ],” although, unlike most earlier Russian historians, he did not consider Peter’s reign a sharp break in Russian history, whose “organic” unfolding “from the earli-est times” to the later seventeenth century occupied the first twelve vol-umes (original edition) of his famous History. Russia, in his view, was ripe for the Petrine revolution. Solov’ev’s laborious archival researches along with the “organic historicism” imbibed from his reading of Hegel, Herder, Vico, Guizot, Michelet, and Ranke had convinced him that the reforms or “trans-formations [preobrazovaniia] ” of Muscovite state and society undertaken by Peter were both necessary and unavoidable. Russia had thereby been wrested at last from her medieval “clannishness,” “emotionality,” and eastward drift and decisively oriented westward, to take, or retake, her place in Europe and so gain entry into the new or modern age (novaia epokha).

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  Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science

  Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure

  • Stefan Hedlund(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  No Church in Christendom allowed itself to be secularized as gra- ciously as the Russian.” 32 While the attack on the church did constitute an important part of Peter’s program, its more fundamental dimension related to modernization of the state. Driven by his urge to break with the country’s byzantine past, in 1697–98 Peter undertook a long tour of study abroad, to be known as the Grand Embassy. Traveling incognito, under the name of Peter Mikhailov, the tsar and his entourage visited a number of European countries, most important Holland and England, where they studied shipbuilding and modern administration. Called home by urgent dispatches of rebellion by old believer circles within the army, Peter had to begin by putting the house in order. A big and powerful man, said to be capable of decapitation by a single blow with the axe, he took a personal part in the repression. According to the Marquis de Custine, “He has been seen in a single evening to strike off twenty heads with his own hand, and has been heard to boast of his address.” 33 Exiting the torture chamber, the tsar proceeded to work on his reputa- tion as a great westernizer, by streamlining the bureaucracy and by toying with the separation of the crown from the state. Introducing notions such as “the common good” and “the benefit of the whole nation,” Peter actively sought to promote a sense of connection between private and public good. 32 Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, p. 240. 33 Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de (1989), Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia, New York: Doubleday, p. 440. Russia’s Historical Legacy 125 The most concrete manifestation of the ambition for modernity and rationality was a new and more professional bureaucracy that was copied from the Swedish college system.

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  Russia's Wars of Emergence 1460-1730

  • Carol Stevens(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This new approach was to have significant implications for military affairs. Russian monarchs had certainly previously demonstrated an interest in military events. Ivan IV, for example, superintended military reform after his army’s first defeat at Kazan. Most recently, Peter’s father, Aleksei Mikhailovich, had attended Russian armies at the front for several years at the start of the Thirteen Years’ War from mobile field headquarters; he had dictated strategy along the Russo-Polish front, exhorted and com- manded his generals, managed the complex chancellery machinery in its support of the largest army Muscovy had ever fielded, and very occasion- ally emerged on the battlefield in person. 5 By the late seventeenth century the military had even become part of the ceremonial representation of the tsar. 6 But Peter changed the kind of attention paid to the military, while raising its intensity to new heights. Peter’s personal style and interests in most things were more practical and participatory than his predecessors’. The military elements of this are part of the Petrine legend: the Tsar earned his promotion up the ranks of his own army (even while he was commander-in-chief), personally worked on the Dutch docks as a shipwright, tested his own military equipment, led his men into battle at Poltava, and got a bullet through his hat for his pains. The young Tsar’s relentless energy and assiduous personal atten- tion to details were important elements of his leadership, and his close attention to military and diplomatic affairs was lifelong. As a result, he developed an impressive grasp and expertise in both areas. His personal involvement carried a political importance beyond his unusual degree of application and knowledge.

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  Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia

  The Transfer of Power 1450–1725

  • Paul Bushkovitch(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 Peter the Great and Succession 1690–1719 The reign of Peter the Great brought to the surface all the ambiguities about succession to the throne in Russia since the fifteenth century. 1 Peter was not the oldest son of his father when the elite and the people of Moscow elected him tsar in 1682, but he was a member of the ruling Romanov family. He came to the throne by election as well as heredity, and the inclusion of his older brother Ivan a month later did not cancel his own election. When he overthrew the rule of his sister Sophia in 1689, he continued to rule with Ivan until the latter’s death. Fortunately he never had to face the situation that would have existed if Ivan had produced a son, so he could treat his own son Aleksei as the heir from birth. Peter the Great’s first son Aleksei was born on February 19, 1690, six months after he overthrew Sophia. For the next twenty-eight years, succession to the throne revolved around Aleksei Petrovich. Peter had no more surviving male children until 1715 (Petr Petrovich), but he did have a number of daughters, two of whom, Anna and Elizabeth, survived to adulthood, the latter eventually to become Empress in 1741. His half- brother Ivan had only daughters, three of them living to adulthood and the second, also named Anna, reigning as empress during the years 1730–40. If the women were taken into account, there were many pos- sible heirs, but the daughters do not seem to have been an option until late in Peter’s reign, after the deaths of Aleksei Petrovich and Petr Petrovich. When the latter boy died in 1719, there was another possible male heir, 1 The literature on Peter is immense. See Reinhard Wittram, Peter I Czar und Kaiser, 2 vols. (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964); N. I. Pavlenko, Petr Velikii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1994); E.

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  St Petersburg, 1703-1825

  • A. Cross(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  As Svin’in writes, only a genius like Peter could have envisaged such a project as St Petersburg. His resourcefulness in founding ‘the magnificent capital of the extensive Russian Empire’ amidst impene- trable forests and swamps and making it habitable was astounding. Still more amazing was the fact that Peter achieved all this while threatened with invasion by the ‘arrogant’ Charles XII of Sweden. Readers were no doubt expected to make the connection that the reason why St Petersburg stood free and intact in 1816, ready to be further embellished, was the equally amazing fact that Alexander had repelled the even more arrogant Napoleon. Alexander I person- ally may have been less devoted to Peter’s memory than were some other Romanovs, 26 but no Russian ruler could avoid placing his or The Works of Pavel Svin’in 155 her efforts and achievements in the Petrine context, whether they presented themselves as completing his work, protecting it or gain- ing inspiration from it. Falconet’s hero ‘seated soundly and firmly on his [metal] steed’ was not primarily a warrior but the ‘father of his people and a wise lawgiver’. The same could be said of Alexander. By association, Svin’in pays tribute to Alexander by detailing the events that occurred around the monument in May 1803 for the celebration of the city’s centenary. Among the participants, guarding Peter’s lit- tle boat (the Grandfather of the Russian Fleet) were four contempo- raries of Peter, including a 107-year-old who had served under the tsar’s command in the navy. This detail emphasized direct links with the heroic past. It was made to seem no accident that this important anniversary fell within Alexander’s reign. In Svin’in’s text one senses none of the growing disillusionment that Russians of a slightly younger generation than Svin’in were beginning to experience in the wake of 1814, which would culminate in the abortive Decembrist revolt of army officers in 1825.

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