Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

Yet he persevered to the end. Now and then, as with Gagarin, he made an example of a prominent delinquent, hoping to deter the smaller ones. Once when Nesterov asked, “Are only the branches to be cut off or are the roots to be cut out?” Peter replied, “Destroy everything, roots and branches alike.” It was a hopeless task; Peter could not compel honesty. In this sense, the Tsar’s admiring contemporary Ivan Pososhkov was right when he wrote, “The great monarch works hard and accomplishes nothing. The Tsar pulls uphill alone with the strength of ten, but millions pull downhill.”

To facilitate trade, Russia needed more circulating currency. New Russian coins had been minted since Peter’s return from the West with the Great Embassy, but coins were so scarce that merchants in Petersburg, Moscow and Archangel borrowed them at fifteen percent interest simply to keep their businesses operating. One reason for this scarcity was the ingrained habit of all Russians, from peasant to noble, of quickly hiding any money on which they could lay their hands. As a foreign visitor explained, “Among the peasants, if by chance one happens to gain a small sum, he hides it under a dunghill, where it lies dead to him and to the nation. The nobility, being afraid of making themselves noticed and obnoxious to the court by the show of their wealth, commonly lock it up in coffers to molder there, or those more sophisticated send it to banks in London, Venice or Amsterdam. Consequently, with all the money thus concealed by nobility and peasants, it has no circulation and the country reaps no benefit from it.” At the beginning of the war, a decree declared that “the hoarding of money is forbidden. Informers who discover a cache are to be rewarded with one third of the money, the remainder to go to the state.”

Peter’s commands, issued impatiently from above, often were received without the slightest understanding of what was wanted or why. This compelled the Tsar not only to supervise everything closely himself, but also to employ force to get things done. Traditionally conservative, Russians balked at innovations, and Peter told his ministers, “You know yourselves that anything that is new, even if it is good and necessary, our people will not do without being compelled.” He never apologized for using force. In a decree in 1723, he explained that “our people are like children who never want to begin the alphabet unless they are compelled to by the teacher. It seems very hard to them at first, but when they have learned it, they are thankful. So in manufacturing affairs, we must not be satisfied with the proposing of the idea only, but we must act and even compel.”

There were occasions when enterprises foundered simply because Peter was not present to give instructions. His temper could be so fierce and unpredictable that, in the absence of specific orders, people were unwilling to take initiative and simply did nothing. In Novgorod, for example, a large number of leather saddles and harnesses had been stored for the army. The local authorities knew that they were there, but because no order to distribute them had come down from above, they were left until “eventually, moldy and rotten, they had to be dug up with spades.” Similarly, in 1717, many oak trunks brought from central Russia through the canals to Lake Ladoga for use in building the Baltic fleet were left to wash up on the shores and bury themselves in mud, simply because Peter was away in Germany and France and had not left specific instructions for their use.

The soul tax solved Peter’s problem of revenue, but at the cost of placing an even heavier burden on the peasants and strengthening the bonds of the serfdom that tethered them to the land. In earlier times, Russian peasants had been free to move where they wished, a right that made it difficult and sometimes impossible for landowners to meet their needs for labor. This crisis intensified in the middle of the sixteenth century when Ivan the Terrible conquered Kazan and Astrachan, opening to Russian colonization vast regions of virgin black earth previously inhabited by nomads. By the thousands and hundreds of thousands, Russian peasants abandoned the forest to the north and poured into this flat, rich country. Farms and villages in central Russia were left uninhabited; whole provinces were semi-deserted. Landowners, threatened with ruin, appealed to the state, and the state, unable to collect taxes from empty villages, reacted. Beginning in the 1550’s, decrees forbidding peasants to leave the land were issued. Runaway peasants were pursued, and in 1649 it was declared that any person who harbored them was liable to their landlord for his losses. In Peter’s time, over ninety-five percent of the people were serfs; some were state peasants and some belonged to private landlords, but all were bound for life to the land they worked.

In the end, Peter’s tax policies were a success for the state and a massive burden for the people. When the Emperor died, the state did not owe a kopek. Peter had fought twenty-one years of war, constructed a fleet, a new capital, new harbors and canals without the aid of a single foreign loan or subsidy (indeed, it was he who paid subsidies to his allies, especially Augustus of Poland). Every kopek was raised by the toil and sacrifice of the Russian people within a single generation. He did not float internal loans so that future generations could help to pay for his projects, nor did he devalue the currency by issuing paper money as Goertz had done on behalf of Charles XII of Sweden. Instead, he laid the entire burden on his contemporary Russians. They strained, they struggled, they opposed, they cursed. But they obeyed.

Beyond what might be called the innocent ignorance of the Russian clergy, there was another failing which drove the Tsar into a rage. This was the widespread superstition of the Russian people and the playing on this trait by certain unscrupulous people, including members of the clergy. The common people believed in everyday miracles—believed that by the intercession of a specific icon of Christ, the Virgin Mary or one of the special Russian saints, a miraculous personal advantage might be obtained. Unquestioning belief made fertile ground for charlatans. When Peter came upon this kind of unscrupulous priest, his anger flared. One priest in St. Petersburg, for example, persuaded the people that a picture of the Virgin Mary which he kept in his house could work miracles, but only those who could pay were allowed access. “Though he carried on this trade with great circumspection in the nighttime and took all imaginable care in recommending secrecy to his customers, yet the Tsar got information of it,” said Weber. “The priest’s house was searched and the miraculous image fetched away, which the Tsar caused to be brought to him in order to see whether it could perform miracles in His Majesty’s presence. But the priest, at the sight of it, threw himself at the Tsar’s feet and confessed his imposture, for which he was carried to the fortress and suffered heavy corporal punishment, and was afterward degraded from his office in order to be made an example to his brethren.”

Not surprisingly, the impostures which angered Peter most were those which challenged or threatened his own will. On one occasion, a peasant who disliked being forced to live in St. Petersburg prophesied that the following September the Neva would flood so high that it would cover an ancient and lofty ash tree which stood near a church. People immediately began to move themselves and their belongings to higher ground. Peter, furious at this interruption of his plans for the city, ordered the tree cut down and the peasant imprisoned until September. At the end of that month, when no sign of the threatened inundation had appeared, the population was summoned to the site of the tree stump, on which a scaffold had been built. The rustic seer was brought, lifted onto the scaffold and given fifty lashes with the knout while the crowd was lectured on the foolhardiness of listening to false prophets.

A more sophisticated religious hoax simultaneously provoked Peter’s wrath and stimulated his curiosity. In 1720, an icon of the Virgin Mary in a church in St. Petersburg was said to be shedding tears because she was obliged to live in so dismal a part of the world. Chancellor Golovkin heard the report and went to the church, forcing his way through a dense crowd which had gathered to marvel at the phenomenon. Golovkin immediately sent for Peter, who was a day’s journey away, inspecting the Ladoga Canal. Peter came at once, traveling all night, and went directly to the church. The priests took him to the miraculous icon, which at that moment was dry-eyed, although numerous spectators assured him that they had seen tears. Peter stared up at the icon, which was covered with paint and thick varnish, and decided that something about it looked suspicious. He ordered it lifted down from its elevated position and brought to his palace, where in the presence of the Chancellor, many noblemen, the leaders of the clergy and the priests who had been present when the icon was taken down, he proceeded to examine it. He soon found several tiny holes in the corners of the eyes which the shadows ...

Repeatedly and urgently, the bishops begged the Tsar to name a new patriarch. At last Peter responded, but in a manner very different from that which they expected. In the years since the last patriarch had died, Peter had traveled abroad and seen much of other religions in both Catholic and Protestant countries. The Roman church, of course, was administered by a single man, but in Protestant lands the churches were administered by a synod or assembly or board of administrators, and this idea appealed to Peter. Having already reformed his civil administration by putting government in the hands of ministries or colleges, he was ready to impose a comparable structure on the church. In the latter part of 1718, Peter entrusted to Prokopovich the drafting of a church charter called the Ecclesiastical Regulation, which was to promulgate a new administrative structure for the Russian Orthodox Church. Prokopovich worked for many months, and the document is his most important achievement, but every section was read, revised and sometimes rewritten by Peter himself.

In time, however, the assumption of state control over the church had an injurious effect on Russia. Individual parishioners could seek salvation and find solace from life’s burdens in the glory of the Orthodox service and its choral liturgy, and in the warm communality of human suffering found in a church community. But a tame church which occupied itself with private spiritual matters and failed to stand up against successive governments on behalf of Christian values in questions of social justice soon lost the allegiance of the most dynamic elements of Russian society. The most fervent peasants and simple people seeking true religion gravitated toward the Old Believers and other sects. Students, educated people and the middle classes disdained the church for its conservative anti-intellectualism and slavish support of the regime. The church, which might have led, simply followed, and ultimately the entire religious bureaucracy established by Peter followed the imperial government over the cliff; the Holy Synod was abolished in 1918 along with all the other governing institutions of the imperial regime. Lenin reestablished the Patriarchate, but it was a puppet Patriarchate, more controlled by the state than the Holy Synod ever was. Not once in its existence has this new Patriarchate uttered a word of criticism against the regime it serves. It was the continuing passivity and servitude of the Russian church which Alexander Solzhenitsyn was regretting when he declared that...

When Peter was traveling, he took his midday nap lying upon straw, using a dentchik’s stomach as a pillow. The dentchik, according to one who had served in this capacity, was “obliged to wait patiently in this posture and not make the least motion for fear of waking him, for he was as good-humored when he had slept well as he was gloomy and ill-tempered when his slumber had been disturbed.”

was Peter’s belief that magnificence of ornament and display had nothing to do with greatness. He always remembered the simplicity of the royal palaces in England and Holland and the restraint and modesty shown by William III, who was the ruler of two of the wealthiest nations in Europe. Nor did Peter care for bombastic flattery. When two Dutchmen toasted him overlavishly, Peter laughed. “Bravo, my friends. Thank you,” he said, shaking his head. In his relations with people of all ranks, Peter’s manners were free and easy. He rarely observed protocol. He hated long, ceremonial banquets; such occasions, he said, had been invented “to punish the great and rich for their sins.” At official banquets, he always gave the place of honor to Romodanovsky or Menshikov and seated himself near the end of the table in order to be able to escape. When he rode through the streets, it was in a small, open, two-wheeled carriage, like a Victorian love-seat on wheels, with room only for himself and one other passenger (one foreigner declared scornfully that no respectable Moscow merchant would set foot in so petty a vehicle). In winter; he used a simple one-horse sledge with a single attendant, who sat beside him. Peter still preferred walking to riding—on foot, he could see more and could stop to take a second look. He spoke to everyone he met.

Peter’s habit of walking freely among his people carried personal danger. There were reasons enough for an assassin to strike; indeed, many believed he was the Antichrist. One summer when Peter was attending a meeting in his Summer Palace on the Fontanka, a stranger quietly stole into the palace antechamber. In his hand, he carried a small colored bag similar to those in which secretaries and clerks brought papers for the Tsar to sign. The man waited quietly, attracting no attention, until Peter walked into the room, escorting his ministers to the door. At this point, the stranger stood up, drew something from his bag, wrapped the bag around it to conceal it and moved toward Peter. The Tsar’s attendants did not block him, assuming that he was an orderly or servant of one of the ministers. At the last minute, however, a dentchik stepped forward and took the stranger’s arm. A scuffle followed and, as Peter turned, a knife with a six-inch blade fell to the floor. Peter asked the man what he had meant to do. “To assassinate you,” the stranger replied. “But why? Have I done you any harm?” Peter asked. “No, but you have done harm to my brethren and religion,” said the man, declaring that he was an Old Believer.

Assassins did not frighten Peter, but there were creatures before which he trembled: cockroaches. When he traveled, he never entered a house until he had been assured that no cockroaches were present and his own room had been carefully swept by his own servants. This followed an episode in which Peter, as a guest at dinner in a country house, asked if his host ever had cockroaches. “Not many,” the host replied, “and to chase them away, I have pinned a living one to the wall.” He pointed to the place where the insect was pinned, sti...

Above all, he loved the launching of a new ship; generally frugal, he did not mind spending large sums to celebrate this kind of event, and crowds flocked to the Admiralty to share in his largess. The occasion always demanded an enormous banquet on the decks of the new vessel, and the Tsar, his face shining, his voice excited, could be found at the center of all activity, accompanied by his family, including his daughters and even the aging Tsaritsa Praskovaya, who never missed a launching and its attendant rivers of alcohol. These parties inevitably ended with General-Admiral Apraxin bursting into tears and moaning that he was a lonely old man and with the mighty Prince Menshikov drunk and inert under the table, whereupon his servants would send for his wife, Princess Darya, and her sister, who came to revive him with smelling salts, massage and cold water, “and then would get permission from the Tsar to take him home.”

For a man as impatient and charged with energy as Peter, relaxation was difficult. “What do you do at home?” he once asked those around him. “I don’t know how to stay at home with nothing to do.”

Peter relaxed best when he was working with his hands: wielding a hatchet at the Admiralty shipyard, bent over his lathe turning objects in wood or ivory, or hammering out iron bars next to a forge. The Emperor enjoyed visiting iron foundries—he liked the pumping of the bellows, the glowing of the metal in the fires, the clang of hammers on the anvils—and he had learned the basic skills of the blacksmith’s trade. Once he spent a month working in the forges of a master blacksmith named Werner Muller. Peter worked hard, forging 720 pounds of iron bars in a single day, and when he asked for his pay, Muller lavishly overpaid him. Peter refused the excess, accepting only the wage of an average smith, then taking the sum to a shop where he bought a pair of shoes. Afterward, he showed his new shoes proudly to everyone saying, “I have earned them by the sweat of my brow with a hammer and an anvil.”

The death of this favorite child, in whom Peter had placed his hopes for the future of the dynasty, overwhelmed him. He rammed his head against a wall so hard that he went into a convulsion; then for three days and nights, he shut himself up in his room and refused to come out or even to speak to anyone through the door. During all this time, he remained stretched on his couch without eating. The business of government came to a halt, the war with Sweden was ignored, messages and letters went unanswered. Catherine, overcoming her own grief, became alarmed at her husband’s obsessive despondency and knocked at his door and called to him, but no answer came, and she retired, weeping, to beg for help from Prince Jacob Dolgoruky. The aged First Senator calmed the frightened Tsaritsa and summoned the entire Senate to meet outside Peter’s door. Dolgoruky knocked. There was no answer. Knocking again, Dolgoruky called out to the Tsar that he was there with the entire Senate, that the country needed its Tsar, and that if Peter did not open the door immediately, he would be obliged to break it down and carry the sovereign away by force as the only means of saving the crown. The door opened and a pale and haggard Peter stood before them. “What is the matter?” he asked. “Why do you come to disturb my repose?” “Because your retirement and your excessive and useless sorrow are the cause of the disorder that prevails in the country,” replied Dolgoruky. Peter bowed his head. “You are right...

1718, Peter instituted his new assemblies, or evening parties, which were held two or three times a week during the long winter. They were the most important part of the Tsar’s effort to bring the two sexes together and give Petersburg a taste of the genteel social intercourse which he had witnessed in the salons of Paris. Because this idea was a novelty in Russia, Peter issued regulations, spelling out to his subjects exactly what the new assemblies were meant to be and how they were to be performed.

His explanation, typically, has the sound of a teacher lecturing pupils: Regulation for Keeping Assemblies at Petersburg Assembly is a French term which cannot be rendered in a single Russian word: It signifies a number of persons meeting together, either for diversion or to talk about their own affairs. Friends may see each other on that occasion, to confer together on business or other subjects, to inquire after domestic and foreign news, and so to pass their time. After what manner we will have those assemblies kept may be learned from what follows: 1. The person at whose house the assembly is to be in the evening is to hand out a bill or other sign to give notice to all persons of either sex. 2. The assembly shall not begin sooner than four or five in the afternoon, nor continue later than ten at night. 3. The master of the house is not obliged to go and meet his guests, to conduct them out, or to entertain them; but though he himself is exempt from waiting on them, he ought to find chairs, candles, drink and all the other necessaries asked for, as also to provide for all sorts of gaming and what belongs thereto. 4. No certain hour is fixed for anybody’s coming or going; it is sufficient if one makes his appearance at the assembly. 5. It is left to everyone’s liberty to sit, walk or play, just as he likes, nor shall anybody hinder him or take exception at what he does, on pain of emptying the Great Eagle [a bowl filled with wine or brandy] to be swallowed as punishme...

Before long, St. Petersburg society flocked to these receptions. In one room there would be dancing, in another people playing cards, in a third a group of men solemnly smoking their long clay pipes and drinking from earthenware mugs, and in a fourth men and women laughing, gossiping and enjoying one another in a way hitherto unknown in Russia. Peter was always there, merry and talkative, moving from room to room or sitting at a table, smoking a long Dutch pipe, sipping Hungarian wine and studying his next move in a game of draughts or chess. The course of these assemblies did not always run smoothly. Prince Gregory Dolgoruky and the younger Prince Romodanovsky, old enemies from a divorce suit, got into a fist fight at the supper table; on another occasion, a guest climbed onto the table and, walking along it, stumbled into a pie. But in general, the level of behavior was pleasing to the watchful eye of the imperial mentor who had performed this miracle of blending the society of Old Russia with the society of Europe.

Another result of the sudden emancipation of Russian women after centuries of sequestration was a general easing of morality, or what Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov later described as “a depravation of morals.” Peter’s personal behavior in this area remains obscure. Anna Mons and Catherine were his mistresses at different times. Catherine’s maids of honor Marie Hamilton and Marie Cantemir were rumored to have received his favors, and several eighteenth-century writers wrote rollicking accounts of Catherine traveling through Europe accompanied by a suite of ladies, each one carrying her baby by Peter in her arms. One presumes that Peter was not chaste and that the stories of a liaison with an actress in London or a lady in Paris may be true. It is clear, however, that these affairs, if they took place, were episodes to which Peter gave little thought and attached no importance. Catherine understood this and frequently teased him in her letters. Peter’s assurances that no other woman would be interested in “an old fellow like me” were good-humored but sometimes a little red-faced.

Anne lived only four years after her marriage and died when she was twenty. But fate used her and her husband to continue Peter’s line on the Russian throne. They returned to Holstein, where at Kiel, shortly before her death, Anne gave birth to a son whose name became Karl Ulrich Peter. In 1741, when this boy was thirteen, his Aunt Elizabeth became empress. Unmarried and needing to designate an heir, she brought her nephew back to Russia and changed his name to Peter Fedorovich. In 1762, on Elizabeth’s death, he succeeded to the throne as Emperor Peter III. Six months later, he was deposed and murdered by supporters of his German wife. This vigorous lady then seized the throne, was crowned Empress Catherine II and became known to the world as Catherine the Great. The son, grandsons and further descendants of Peter III and Catherine the Great occupied the Russian throne until 1917, all of them ultimately tracing their ancestry back through Princess Anne and Charles Frederick of Holstein, nephew of Charles XII, to Peter the Great.

Peter’s efforts to marry both his daughters to foreign princes suggested that he did not envision either of them as his successor on the Russian throne. Indeed, no woman had ever sat on that throne. But the death of Peter Petrovich in 1719 left only one remaining male in the House of Romanov—Peter Alexeevich, son of the Tsarevich Alexis. Many Russians regarded him now as the legitimate heir, and Peter was well aware that the traditionalists looked upon the young Grand Duke as their future hope. This hope he was determined to thwart.

Catherine’s powers and the Emperor’s long-range intent were unspecified. As a sign that she exercised some aspects of sovereignty, Peter allowed her to create old Peter Tolstoy a count, a title which all his descendants, including the great novelist Lev Tolstoy, have worn.

And the years had taken their toll. In 1724, Peter was only fifty-two, but his huge exertions, his ceaseless motion, the violent excesses of drink in which he had indulged in his youth, had severely undermined his once magnificent constitution. At fifty-two, the Emperor was an old man. Beyond these afflictions, he had a new illness, the one which eventually was to kill him. For some years, he had suffered from an infection of the urinary tract, and in 1722, during the summer heat of the Persian campaign, the symptoms reappeared. His doctors diagnosed strangury and stone, a blockage in the urethra and bladder caused by muscle spasms or infection. During the winter of 1722–1723, the pain in the urethra returned. At first, Peter mentioned it to no one except his valet, and continued to drink and carouse in his normal way, but soon the pain grew stronger and he had to consult his doctors. For the next two years, he was constantly in and out of pain. He followed the doctors’ advice, swallowing their drugs and limiting his drinking to a little kvas and a very occasional glass of brandy. Some days he suffered and could scarcely attend to business; then for a while he would enjoy a period of respite when he could resume his normal activity.

Near the end of the summer in 1724, the disease reappeared and this time the symptoms were much worse. Unable to pass urine, Peter was in agony. His personal physician, Dr. Blumentröst, summoned a consulting physician, Dr. Horn, an English surgeon. To facilitate a passage, Horn inserted a catheter, repeatedly attempting to penetrate the bladder but obtaining only blood and pus. Eventually, with great difficulty, he managed to extract about half a glass of urine. During this probing, unattended by anesthesia, Peter lay on a table, holding the hand of one doctor on each side of him. He was trying to be still, but so great was his pain that the two hands he held were almost crushed. Eventually, a giant stone was passed and the pain abated. Within a week, his urine began to pass in an almost normal way. He remained in bed for many more weeks, however, and not until the end of September was he beginning to walk around his room and impatiently awaiting the moment when he could resume his normal life.

The succession was quickly settled in favor of Catherine. While Peter still drew his last breaths, a group from the Emperor’s inner circle of favorites, among them Menshikov, Yaguzhinsky and Tolstoy—all of them “new men” created by Peter, all with much to lose if the old nobility came back to power—had moved decisively to support Catherine. Guessing rightly that the Guards regiments would make the ultimate decision on the succession, they summoned these troops into the capital and massed them near the palace. There, the soldiers were reminded that Catherine had accompanied them and her husband on military campaigns. All arrears in military pay were swiftly paid in the name of the Empress. The Guards regiments were devoted to the Emperor, and Catherine was already popular with both officers and men; with these new inducements, they readily pledged their support.

It was in Kiel, on May 28, 1728, that Princess Anne died, shortly after giving birth to a son, the future Emperor Peter III. A ball given in her honor to celebrate the birth had been followed by a display of fireworks. Although the Baltic weather was cold and damp, the happy young mother insisted upon standing on an open balcony to get a better view. When her ladies worried, she laughed and said, “I am Russian, remember, and used to a much worse climate than this.” Within ten days, this eldest daughter of Peter the Great was dead.

Death came too quickly and unexpectedly for Peter II to follow the procedure established by his grandfather and nominate a successor. Accordingly, it devolved upon the Supreme Privy Council, now dominated by Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, to choose a sovereign. The pleasure-loving Princess Elizabeth, last child of Peter the Great, was considered too frivolous, and Catherine of Mecklenburg, the eldest daughter of Tsar Ivan V (Peter the Great’s afflicted half-brother and co-Tsar) and Tsaritsa Praskovaya, was thought to be too much under the influence of her husband, the Duke of Mecklenburg. The choice therefore fell on the second daughter of Ivan V: Anne, Duchess of Courland, who had been a widow since a few months after her marriage in 1711. The offer made to Anne carried many restrictive conditions. She was not to marry and not to appoint her successor. The council would retain approval over war and peace, the levying of taxes and expenditure of money, the granting of estates and the appointment of all officers above the rank of colonel. Anne accepted the conditions, arrived in Russia and, with the support of the Guards regiments and the service gentry, immediately tore up the conditions, abolished the Supreme Privy Council and reestablished the power of the autocracy.

Empress Anne died in 1740, leaving the throne to the grandson of her elder sister, Catherine of Mecklenburg. This child, Ivan VI, scarcely knew he was emperor; he inherited the throne at the age of two months and was dethroned at the age of fifteen months to be held as a secret state prisoner for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. His successor was Elizabeth, now thirty-one, still pleasure-loving and beloved by the Guards Regiment with whose help she seized the throne, primarily because she feared she was to be sent to a convent by the adherents of Ivan VI. Elizabeth’s reign lasted twenty-one years (1741–1762), then followed the brief reign of Peter III and the thirty-four-year reign of Catherine the Great.

Thus, Peter the Great’s overturning of the laws of succession and his proclamation that every sovereign should have the right to designate the heir led to an anomaly in Russian history: Since the distant days of the Kievan state, no woman had reigned in Russia; after his death in 1725, four empresses reigned almost continuously for the next seventy-one years. They were Peter’s wife (Catherine I), his niece (Anne), his daughter (Elizabeth) and his grandson’s wife (Catherine the Great). The reigns of three pitiable males (Peter the Great’s grandsons Peter II and Peter III and his brother’s great-grandson Ivan VI) were interspersed among these women, but their three reigns encompassed only forty months. Upon the death of Catherine the Great, her son Paul, who hated his mother, became emperor. On the day of his coronation, he upset Peter the Great’s decree on the succession and established hereditary primogeniture in the male line. Thereafter, Russia’s sovereigns were again all male: Paul’s sons Alexander I and Nicholas I, his grandson Alexander II, his great-grandson Alexander III and his great-great-grandson Nicholas II.

There were, of course, dissenting views. The hope of the common people that Peter’s death would mean a lifting of their heavy burdens of service and taxation expressed itself in a popular lithograph titled “The Mice Bury the Cat.” This sly work depicts an enormous whiskered cat with a recognizable face, now trussed on a sledge with its paws in the air, being dragged away by a band of celebrating mice. In the nineteenth century, traditionalists who believed in the inherent values of Muscovite culture blamed Peter as the first to open the door to Western ideas and innovations. “We began [in Peter’s reign] to be citizens of the world,” said the conservative historian Nikolai Karamzin, “but we ceased in some measure to be citizens of Russia.” A grand-scale historical and philosophical debate evolved between two schools: the “Slavophiles” who deplored the contamination and destruction of old Russian culture and institutions, and the “Westernizers” who admired and praised Peter for suppressing the past and forcing Russia onto the road of progress and enlightenment. The arguments often became heated, as when the influential literary critic Vassarion Belinsky described Peter as “the most extraordinary phenomenon not only in our history but in the history of mankind … a deity who has called us into being and who has breathed the breath of life into the body of ancient Russia, colossal, but prostrate in deadly slumber.”

Soviet historians have not had an easy time coping with the figure of Peter the Great. Required to write history within the framework not only of general Marxist theory and terminology but also of the current party line, they sway back and forth between portraying Peter as irrelevant (individuals play no part in historical evolution), as an exploitative autocrat building “a national state of landowners and merchants,” and as a national hero defending Russia against external enemies. A small but graphic example of this ambivalence is the treatment of Peter at the Poltava Battlefield Museum. A large statue of the Emperor stands in front of the museum, and the visual exhibits inside all emphasize the presence and role of Peter. But the written material in captions and booklets obediently ascribes the victory to the efforts of “the fraternal Russian and Ukrainian peoples.”

Peter himself was realistic and philosophical about the way he was seen and would be remembered. Osterman recalled a conversation with a foreign ambassador in which Peter asked what the opinion was of him abroad. “Sire,” replied the ambassador, “everyone has the highest and best opinion of Your Majesty. The world is astonished above all at the wisdom and genius you display in the execution of the vast designs which you have conceived and which have spread the glory of your name to the most distant regions.” “Very well, very well, that may be,” said Peter impatiently, “but flattery says as much of every king when he is present. My object is not to see the fair side of things, but to know what judgment is formed of me on the opposite side of the question. I beg you to tell it to me, whatever it may be.” The ambassador bowed low. “Sire,” he said, “since you order me, I will tell you all the ill I have heard. You pass for an imperious and severe master who treats his subjects rigorously, who is always ready to punish and incapable of forgiving a fault.” “No, my friend,” said Peter, smiling and shaking his head, “this is not all. I am represented as a cruel tyrant; this is the opinio...

The arguments about Peter and the controversies over his reforms have never ended. He has been idealized, condemned, analyzed again and again, and still, like the broader issues of the nature and future of Russia itself, he remains essentially mysterious. One quality which no one disputes is his phenomenal energy. “Eternal toiler upon the throne of Russia,” Pushkin described him. “It is an age of gold in which we are living,” Peter himself wrote to Menshikov. “Without loss of a single instant, we devote all our energies to work.” He was a force of nature, and perha...