Riasanovsky, pp. 213-41, 276-84;
Dmytryshyn, pp. 1-49
Peter the Great or Peter I (1672-1725) commanded attention from the moment of his birth, memorialized by a medal inscribed "Great Hope of the Future," till our own day when the citizens of Leningrad recently voted to rename their city St. Petersburg, the official name from its foundation in 1703 until 1914. This giant of a man—some six feet seven inches tall at the end of his life—personified the new Russian Empire into which he had transformed Muscovy. He accomplished many "firsts": the first Muscovite ruler to venture abroad, to meet European rulers in person, to have the name Peter, to use a Roman numeral after his name, to adopt a new European-style calendar, to marry a non-Slav (Catherine I was the russified name of Marta Skavronska, of Livonian common background), to sail the seas, to name himself emperor, to participate in battle, to build ships and European-style towns and edifices, to draft laws, to be painted and sculpted by foreign artists, to lend his name to an entire era, and to become the subject of a cult even during his lifetime.
His many-sided activities have given rise to multiple epithets that seek to capture the man and the ruler: soldier-tsar, artisan-tsar, Tsar-Transformer, Father of the Fatherland, Emperor of All Russia, The Bronze Horseman, Anti-Christ, First Bolshevik, and of course "the Great." It is curious that during most of the Soviet era after 1917, professional historians in the USSR were forbidden to call him Peter the Great, a formulation that obstensibly violated Marxist-Leninist axioms about the primacy of the masses in making history. By contrast, people in the street have always called him Peter the Great. His enduring celebrity is attested by his depiction in film: the well-known Soviet black and white film of the 1930s, a lesser-known color depiction in The Youth of Peter the Great of the 1970s, the comedic The Blackamoor of Peter the Great based on Pushkin's tale, and the 1986 NBC TV mini-series based on Robert Massie's Pulitizer Prize-winning biography and starring Maximilian Schell as Peter.
Professor Nicholas Riasanovsky obviously admires Peter, so much so that he wrote a book about him: The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (Oxford University Press, 1985). In a brief sketch of Peter's personality on pages 4 and 5, Riasanovsky uses such phrases as "impressive individual," "overwhelming presence," "in a constant state of restless activity," "insatiable intellectual curiosity," "accomplished military and naval commander," "unbending will, determination, and dedication," "amazing self-confidence and directness," "strangely dissolute style of life," "constant, driving, obsessive activity in almost every field of endeavor," and above all, "a tremendous worker." Yet this praise is briefly tempered by Riasanovsky's contention that "Internally Peter the Great was constantly at the boiling point, possibly on the verge of breakdown or madness" (p. 5). The leading American scholar of Petrine Russia, James Cracraft of the University of Illinois at Chicago, has pointed to some of the darker sides of Peter's personality and policies, citing his elaborate parodies of church ritual as evidence of "a more complex, in part morbid, personality," exploring several records of Peter's dreams for testimony of "fundamental inner conflict," and explaining the opposition to his rule as "both constant and pervasive—in effect the history of his reign." ("Peter I," The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, vol. 27 [1982], 224-235.) E. V. Anisimov, the leading Soviet specialist on Peter's reforms, even applies the term "totalitarian" and sums up his policies as amounting to "progress through coercion." (Vremia Petrovskikh reform [Leningrad, 1989], p. 13; my translation of a shortened version of this book is to be published in 1992 by M.E. Sharpe as The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Coercion.)
Other Soviet scholars have noted the many parallels between Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible: their long, eventful reigns, the primacy of warfare, their European orientation, their murder of their eldest sons and heirs, their rejection of the past and division of the country and its culture, their tough treatment of the church, and their creation of new hierarchies to support their autocratic authority. One might add their difficulties in accession and succession. Both may also be seen as primary architects of the Russian police state and early exponents of state-imposed terror. Such strictures contest the overwhelmingly positive images of Peter propagated from his own time and broadcast to the world by uncritical admirers such as Voltaire and Robert Massie.
Top of Page | Bottom of PagePeter's reign, nominally begun at age nine in 1682, did not actually start until 1689 or later when he ousted Sophia, began seriously experimenting with sailing craft on lakes in 1692 and on the sea at Arkhangel'sk in 1693 and 1694, and did not attend his mother's funeral in 1694. Large army maneuvers in 1694 with live ammunition and the novel attack on Azov in 1695, although the latter failed, showed Peter's restless daring and high ambitions in attacking Ottoman possessions, which he captured in 1696, the same year that Ivan's death left him as sole ruler. The Grand Embassy to Northern Europe for sixteen months in 1697-98 displayed Peter's determination to meet rulers such as William of Orange (William III of England), August II, Elector of Saxony and elected king of Poland, Emperor Leopold I of Austria, and Frederick III, elector of Brandenburg and later king in Prussia. In London Peter met Isaac Newton, recruited hundreds of skilled men, and visited Parliament and other institutions. He intended to visit Venice, too, but cut short his tour from Leipzig to Dresden and Prague at Vienna when he received news of the streltsy rebellion at Moscow. Back in Moscow by late August 1698, Peter supervised the investigation and punishment of the rebellious streltsy and abolished that institution at the same time that Sophia was forced to become a nun. These events saw the creation of the Preobrazhensky Bureau, Russia's first permanent political police.
The Grand Embassy had been intended to spearhead an anti-Turkish coalition, but this failed when Austria made peace with the Turks in 1698 and Muscovy made a temporary truce. With Saxon and Danish allies, Peter declared war on Sweden in 1700 in what initially looked like an easy campaign but which quickly turned into the Great Northern War (1700-1721), a conflict that sorely tested the tsar and his nation. Initial defeat in 1700 was soon recouped by successful campaigns around Lake Ladoga, which permitted the foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703 at the mouth of the Neva River. And the great victory of Poltava on 27 June 1709 (according to the Julian Calendar or old style) foiled King Charles XII's invasion and led directly to the Russian conquest of the Baltic coast from Vyborg to Riga. Despite the disastrous defeat on the Pruth by the Turks in 1711, Peter steadily worsted the Swedes and finally forced peace on them at Nystadt in 1721. At the celebrations of this great victory in St. Petersburg in October 1721, Peter was proclaimed emperor and "the Great, Most Wise Father of the Fatherland." He had occasionally used the title of emperor before 1721, perhaps in consequence of the annexation of the European-oriented Baltic provinces, but the title and the term Russian Empire became permanent from 1721.
The primacy of warfare throughout Peter's reign also resulted in the peculiar kind of industrialization that developed, particularly in iron and textile production for the needs of the army and the fleet. A new center of mining was developed in the remote Ural Mountains and was led by the Demidov family, whose eight metal foundries in 1725 produced more than half of Russia's 14,670 tons of iron, almost two-thirds from the Urals. This industrial boom anticipated certain features later associated with Stalinist industrialization: the dominant role of the state; primacy of war needs; a stress on self-sufficiency; employment of foreign technical expertise; widespread use of compulsory labor; prominence of huge prestige projects such as the new capital of St. Petersburg, the Kronstadt harbor and naval base, canals, and the navy; enormous costs and waste; and yet relative success.
Peter's Grand Embassy also inaugurated the Cultural Revolution. He began by recruiting foreign specialists of many types, prohibiting the boyars from wearing beards and enjoining them to wear German-style clothes, and introducing the new calendar to begin 1 January 1700. In a broad sense, the Petrine Cultural Revolution aimed to rapidly introduce the fruits of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Discovery, and the Scientific Revolution. Technological hallmarks of modernity in Europe included gunpowder, the compass, the printing press, and the telescope, all of which were vigorously utilized under Peter, especially as applied to military affairs. Dimensions of the Renaissance may be seen in the rapid expansion of printing from only three church-related presses that issued six or seven titles per year at the end of the seventeenth century to ten presses under state control that published forty-five titles per year in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The government took over the primary responsibility for printing from the church and employed the press for civic, educational, and utilitarian purposes. All types of textbooks; technical manuals; handbooks on behavior, manners, and childrearing; gazettes; laws; public notices; and patriotic and hagiographic prayers were published. To facilitate the expansion of printing, a new "civil script," much simpler than the church-related orthography, was introduced in 1707. Peter himself accumulated a library of 1,600 books, and reading became a necessity to attain rank and promotion in state service. Peter personified the concept of the Renaissance man with wide and varied interests. He also championed the liberation of elite women from the seclusion typical of Muscovy and ordered noblemen to stage "assemblies" or public receptions and parties for both sexes as in Europe.
The Reformation showed up in Peter's cautious remolding of the church, notably in his abolition of the patriarchate, his establishment of the Holy Synod, and his insistence that the church play a larger role in matters of welfare and education. Church property came under more direct state control, too, most dramatically in the case of his melting down churchbells after the defeat at Narva in order to found new artillery.
The Age of Discovery was reflected in Peter's several journeys abroad, indeed in his passion for travel in general, and in dispatching young nobles to study maritime and other skills in Italy, Holland, and England. His foundation of the Russian navy was a particularly striking innovation and projected Russian power abroad and in competition with maritime powers such as England, Holland, France, and Spain. Peter also had notions of overseas expansion as seen in his outfitting of the first Bering expedition at the end of his life, possibly with a view to following the fur trade farther east and founding settlements in North America. His Persian campaign of 1722-23 likewise sought imperial economic advantage in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, the "Age of Genius," was one of the hallmarks of modernity least developed in Muscovy and one Peter strove mightily to import. His meetings with Newton in 1698 and with Leibniz in 1711 and later symbolized the Russian quest to solicit excellent guidance in importing scientific talent and technology. On the Grand Embassy, Peter had been accompanied by Jacob Daniel Bruce (1670-1735), a russified Scotsman born in Moscow who built up a large scientific library including all of Newton's main works, translated several scientific works, built a Newtonian telescope and other instruments, and popularized the Copernican theory in Russia. Dr. Peter Posnikov (1666-1712), a Muscovite who graduated from the Moscow Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy and was then sent to the University of Padua near Venice for M.D. and Ph.D. degrees, joined the Grand Embassy in Holland and also visited various English learned institutions. His facility in foreign languages diverted him from medicine to diplomatic service, however. Two of the tsar's close long-term friends who spent their careers in Russia were Dr. Robert Erskine (1677-1718), a Fellow of the Royal Society who had a library of 2,500 volumes and was named chief imperial physician (or archiater) in charge of all medical personnel, and Dr. Nikolaas Bidloo (1674-1735), a Dutchman who organized and oversaw the first permanent hospital and surgical school in Moscow in 1707. Both Erskine and Bidloo had wide and varied interests and advised Peter on all sorts of things from medicinal herbs and libraries to botanical gardens, stagecraft, and architecture. Bidloo's Moscow Hospital and Surgical School was directly linked to military affairs because it was intended to train fifty young Muscovites for duty as military surgeons and apothecaries. Since Muscovy had no universities, Muscovites could only obtain the M.D. degree abroad; hence, most doctors were foreigners, mainly Germans. But surgeons and lesser medical personnel were largely Russians or Ukrainians, especially men from clerical backgrounds who knew Latin. A flood of some 3,500 foreign words entered the Russian language in Petrine times, many of them related to technical subjects and to maritime or administrative terminology.
Bidloo's school was similar in concept to the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation, which was founded in 1701 by Professor Henry Farquharson (c.1675-1739), a Scotsman, and two young graduates of the Royal Mathematical School of Christ's Hospital. Like other early Russian "schools," it began as a training camp for literate youth and adults, but it benefitted from an exceptional staff, fine facilities in the Sukharev Tower built in 1692-95 for a streltsy regiment, and its own encyclopedic textbook. Leontii Magnitsky's Arifmetika (1703) provided the basic core of instruction: a vertical curriculum with a variable time-span that stressed practical application and combined moral precepts with versification. The school averaged some 200-500 students per year over the period 1702-1715, when Farquharson transferred to St. Petersburg to head the new Naval Academy. Both Farquharson and Magnitsky did much work in translating English and Dutch naval terminology into Russian to assist the training of sailors for the new Russian fleet. All these initiatives in scientific and technical education were to be capped by the foundation of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, a multipurpose research and educational institution with an associated university and preparatory school that Peter planned late in life and that was founded in central St. Petersburg after his death. Russia's new place on the scientific map was symbolized by this new institution and by the selection of Alexander Menshikov, an illiterate favorite of the tsar from obscure origins who became a great aristocrat with the title of prince of the Holy Roman Empire, to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1714 and Peter's own election to the French Academy of Sciences in 1717.
Top of Page | Bottom of Pagebattles of Azov, Narva, Poltava, and Hangö
the Pruth campaign and Persian campaign
the Bering Expedition
Newton
Leibniz
Henry Farquharson
Leontii Magnitsky
Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation
Peter Posnikov
Robert Erskine
Nikolaas Bidloo
Moscow Hospital and Surgical School
Imperial Academy of Sciences
the Holy Synod
Feofan Prokopovich
Senate
Table of Ranks
guards regiments
Preobrazhenskoe
Alexander Menshikov
Ivan Mazepa
streltsy
Preobrazhensky Bureau
Catherine I
St. Petersburg
Demidov family
Ural Mountains
Alexander Pushkin, "The Negro of Peter the Great," in Avrahm Yarmolinsky, ed., The Poems, Prose and Plays of Alexander Pushkin (New York: The Modern Library, 1936), pp. 745-86.