Readers of a certain generation may recall a pop song called ‘The Carnival Is Over.’ It was a UK number one for the Seekers in 1965, sandwiched between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles; its words spoke of hearts beating ‘like a drum’ and pledges to ‘love you till I die’. But the haunting melody was copied from a traditional Russian folk song whose lyrics were considerably less anaemic. ‘Stenka Razin’ is the violent, bloody tale of a Don Cossack who sails across the Caspian Sea to loot, pillage and abduct a Persian princess. When he proposes to make her his bride, Razin is mocked by his comrades for being so soppy. So, ‘with one mighty blow1 of his brawny arm’, he proves his manhood by throwing the poor woman overboard to her death.
The murder is probably a legend, but Razin himself was a real historical figure. In 1670, he led a revolt against the tsar and the Muscovite state. Setting out from the Cossack heartland on the River Don, he gathered thousands of followers as he marched north – from persecuted peasants to nomadic tribesmen and religious rebels – in a broad alliance of disaffection. Razin proclaimed himself the true tsar and promised an end to exploitation, with freedom and equality for all men. Taken aback by the strength of the revolt, Moscow watched helplessly as his forces captured a string of major towns, including Saratov, Samara and Astrakhan, ordering the execution of aristocrats and government officials, and turning food supplies over to the common people. Razin’s promise of deliverance from the oppression of tsarism and the abolition of class privileges roused the population. By the autumn, his army was nearly 200,000 strong2 and it took a full-scale military campaign before the Kremlin could subdue him.
Stenka Razin’s democratic populism struck a chord with the oppressed lower classes and the non-Russian minorities, exposing a simmering resentment in Russian society and a widening gap between rulers and ruled. When he was hanged, drawn and quartered on Red Square, the crowd stubbornly refused the official order to rejoice – an event commemorated three centuries later in Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem, ‘The Execution of Stenka Razin’:
‘Why, good folk, are you not celebrating3?
Caps into sky – and dance!’
But Red Square is frozen stiff,
the halberds scarcely swaying.
Amid the deadly silence …
The square had understood something.
The square took off their caps,
and the bells
struck three times
seething with rage.
But heavy from its bloody forelock
the head was still rocking,
still alive.
From the blood-wet place of execution,
there where the poor were,
… hoarsely the head spoke:
‘I have not died in vain …’
and, savagely,
not hiding anything of his triumph,
Stenka’s head
burst out laughing at the Tsar!’fn1
Eleven troubled years after Razin’s execution, a new tsar was crowned. Peter I – Peter the Great – was only nine in 1682, and for a decade and a half he would be shamelessly manipulated by relatives and regents in a ruthless, violent power struggle. Peter was initially made to share power with his sickly half-brother Ivan, as the contenders for power jostled around him. Some of his closest friends were murdered before his eyes, and Peter was left with a burning conviction that Russia must change. In 1696, when he assumed full authority, he inherited a host of urgent problems that were tearing the nation apart – the legacy of the Razin rebellion, the split within the Church and the Old Believers’ continuing opposition, the growing disconnect between the Kremlin and the people, and the curse of serfdom.
Peter the Great was a giant, both physically (he was 6 feet 7 inches tall) and intellectually. His relentless energy and fierce determination would make him the most influential ruler in Russian history; only Lenin would come close to him in the impact he had on society and power. Peter reformed the way Russia was governed, creating its first civil service, building a new capital city and bringing the Russian calendar into line with the rest of the world. He constructed a modern army, and a navy that saved Russia from the very real threat of foreign invasion. And he turned a nation in danger of self-destructing into a European great power, with a vast, stable empire capable of supporting her international ambitions. Just as Britain, Spain and Portugal were founding colonies in the New World, Russia was racing to catch up with the world’s great empire builders.
Peter the Great has traditionally been credited with Europeanising Russia; he’s remembered as the great moderniser who ‘opened a window on the West’ and turned the country away from its old Asiatic leanings. In reality, this is only partially true. But what is clear is that his formative years and early education were dominated by progressive, largely civilising European influences. Testimony to Peter’s Westernising character is found in the memoirs of Patrick Gordon, an expatriate Scottish soldier who saved him from an attempted coup and was subsequently appointed senior general in the tsar’s army. Gordon describes a young man who ‘had a great regard for learning4 and was at much pains to introduce it into the country. He rose early; the morning he gave to business till ten or eleven o’clock.’ But he also points out that Peter’s prodigious appetite for work was complemented by a prodigious appetite for other things:
He was a lover of company, and a man of much humour and pleasantry, exceedingly facetious and of vast natural parts … He never kept guards about his person … He never could abide ceremony, but loved to be spoken to frankly and without reserve … All the rest of the day, and a great part of the night, [he devoted] to diversion and pleasure. He took his bottle heartily, so must all the company; for when he was merry himself he loved to see everybody so.
Peter’s carousing was shared at first hand by Patrick Gordon’s son-in-law, Alexander, another of the many Westerners who tutored the young monarch and continued to instil Western ideas in him throughout much of his life. Alexander praises Peter’s ‘great and singular genius’ and testifies that he was ‘through the whole of his life a warm friend to the interests of Great Britain’. ‘No one who was acquainted5 with the civil and military state of Russia in Tsar Peter’s minority,’ he concludes, ‘and was a witness of the almost incredible reformation which he introduced in both, could think with indifference of him, or of the great change which he almost instantaneously made upon a barbarous and uncivilised people.’
But for all the high-flown ideals, Peter never lost touch with the earthy side of his character. It comes as no surprise to hear that Alexander Gordon sealed the tsar’s friendship via the shared Russian and Scottish fondness for a wee dram:
Soon after his arrival6 in Russia, [Alexander] was invited to a marriage where a good many young gentlemen of the best families in the land were present … When the gentlemen were warm with their liquor, some of them spoke very disrespectfully of foreigners in general and of the Scots in particular. Mr Gordon who had a strong passion for his country … gave the one who sat next to him a blow on the temple, which brought him on the floor. In an instant, he and another five were upon Mr Gordon and seemed determined to make him fall a victim to their national prejudice. But Mr Gordon’s fists were so weighty, and bestowed with such goodwill that his antagonists bore the mark of them for several weeks… and he had the glory of the victory in this very unequal combat. Next day a complaint was given in to Tsar Peter, wherein Mr Gordon was represented in the worst light imaginable. His Majesty immediately ordered Mr Gordon to be sent for, [who] owned that this message made him tremble. Putting on a very stern countenance, the tsar asked him how he came to be so turbulent and whether the charge brought against him was just. But Mr Gordon spoke so modestly of his own behaviour and seemed so sorry to have incurred the tsar’s displeasure that the affair ended in a manner quite contrary to the expectations of his enemies. The tsar, after hearing him very patiently, said: ‘Well, Sir, your accusers have done you justice by allowing that you beat six men: and I also will do you justice’ … and on saying this, he returned with a Major’s commission which he presented to Mr Gordon with his own hand.
Peter the Great would be a drinker and reveller for the whole of his life. He combined intelligence and wit with an unremitting penchant for debauchery. With a band of close associates he formed the All-joking, All-drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters, a sort of Hellfire Club, with extravagant rituals of feasting, drunkenness and savage mockery of the Church. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, he could carouse with the best of them. But, like Hal, he maintained an unwavering seriousness of intent and acceptance of his destiny. Having had to share power for the first 14 years of his reign with his imbecile half-brother, Peter assumed sole authority at the age of 23 and took as his official title ‘Peter the First, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias’. This was clearly going to be a ruler to be reckoned with.
Peter the Great’s private apartments are now reconstituted in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. When I was shown around them, the first thing that struck me was how small the rooms were. A man of his great size would have found them physically very restrictive and theories have been advanced that he suffered from a type of agoraphobia, that made him seek refuge in cosy places. It is true that Peter had an aversion to crowds; a nervous affliction made his head jerk uncontrollably, and sudden seizures sometimes caused him to collapse. But Peter also loved the sea and spent as much time as he could on board ship, so a more likely explanation is that he ordered the rooms to be built small because he wanted them to resemble an enfilade of ship’s cabins. Peter studied military matters with an obsessive passion, learning carpentry and seamanship so thoroughly that he could build a vessel with his own hands. Amid the maps and globes and maritime charts in his private rooms, there is a fully equipped workshop with 162 chisels ranged on racks around the walls.
Much of the living room and bedroom furniture in the private apartments is English, and the story of how Peter acquired it sums up the intellectual curiosity, determination and enterprise that would mark his approach to domestic and foreign policy. In 1697, perhaps prompted by Patrick Gordon and his other foreign advisers, the 24-year-old Peter announced he intended to travel incognito through Western Europe dressed as a merchant seaman. The disguise may have been a little thin – he took plenty of royal minders with him – but it allowed Peter to learn at first hand how advanced nations ran their government and their military. In Holland he worked for four months in a shipyard. In England he travelled to London, wrecking the private house where he was lodging, like a modern rock star, and making visits to Oxford and Manchester. He apparently didn’t like the Mancunians very much, but he learned a lot from them about city building that he would put to good use when he embarked on the construction of St Petersburg six years later.
Peter took up residence near the Royal Dockyards at Greenwich, where he signed on as a simple carpenter, keen to learn as much as he could about the world-leading skills of British shipbuilders. One of them, Captain John Perry, to whom Peter took a particular shine, commented that the tsar ‘conversed with our English builders7, who showed him their drawings and the method of laying down by proportion any ship or vessel, of whatever form required, with the rules for moulding and building a ship according to such a drawing, which extremely intrigued and pleased his Majesty, and which he found everywhere practised, in the merchants’ yards as well as those of the King’. Another Greenwich shipwright reports that ‘the Tsar of Muscovy worked with his own hands8 as hard as any man in the yard’. And Perry approvingly concludes:
He spent most of his time9 in what related to war and shipping, and upon the water. He often took the carpenter’s tools in his hands and often worked in the Deptford Yard as he had done before in Holland. He would be found at the smiths’ and at the gun-founders’ and there was scarce any art or mechanic trade whatsoever, from the watchmaker to the coffin-maker, but he inspected it.
On his return home, Peter used the knowledge he had gained to embark on a frenetic building programme for the Russian navy. He had taken back with him to Russia a cohort of British engineers, whom he charged with revolutionising his shipyards. One of them was John Perry, who took a measure of national pride in helping to implement the tsar’s plans:
He now made those Englishmen10 that he had brought over his chief master-builders and he discharged all the [previous] builders, except those who were to finish the ships that they had begun, and those who were left under the command of the English; and he decreed that for the future there should be no ships built but in the English fashion.
With the help of Perry and his fellow engineers, the Russian navy was transformed from a handful of outdated vessels to a fleet of 300 state-of-the-art warships. It was a remarkable achievement that would bring Peter success in two long-held strategic goals – domination of the Baltic Sea in the north after a gruelling war with Sweden, and a first, tenuous toehold on the Black Sea in the south. From being a landlocked state, Russia would finally make the breakthrough to become an empire with an opening on the world.fn2
The lesson Peter had learned from his sojourn in the West was that to succeed, Russia needed to change. And if Russia wanted to stay strong abroad, it needed to tackle the problems undermining it at home. The adoption of European knowhow had worked well for the military, and Peter decided the same modernising methods were needed in civil society.
When Peter the Great founded his new capital city in 1703 (named after St Peter the Apostle, not after himself) he was making a grand statement. His Scottish general, Patrick Gordon, and most of the Russian aristocracy were appalled by the location – a swampy, desolate bog in the distant northwest, where the River Neva enters the Gulf of Finland. But the audacity of Peter’s choice was charged with an emblematic resonance of renewal and adventure that would inspire future generations, including the greatest of all Russian writers, Alexander Pushkin. His epic poem ‘The Bronze12 Horseman’, written a hundred years later, opens with an elegant love letter to the young European city of St Petersburg, ‘gem of the Northern world’, whose splendour would oust the old, Asiatic-leaning Moscow:
… Oh, how I love thee, city of Peter’s making;
I love thy harmonies austere,
And Neva’s sov’reign waters breaking
Along her banks of granite sheer …
A century – and that city young,
Gem of the Northern world, amazing,
From gloomy wood and swamp up-sprung,
Has risen, in pride and splendour blazing …
To that young capital now is drooping
The crest of Moscow – on the ground;
A dowager in purple, stooping,
Before an empress newly crowned.
Petersburgers still passionately believe their city is special – different from all others – and I can understand why. When I came to study here in the mid 1970s, I found the imperial scale of the place almost surreal: the never-ending boulevards and even vaster squares; the White Nights when darkness is banished and the city takes on its magical aura of ethereal beauty – you can see why Peter was obsessed with it. And you can see why the opening of a ‘window on Europe’ has become the defining metaphor of his reign. The oppressive years of Mongol domination had changed Russia. The Muscovy that emerged from the Mongol yoke had become closed and inward-looking. Foreigners were all regarded as potential enemies; the Kremlin kept out European ideas.
But Peter, it seemed, was renouncing all that. Ancient, cramped Moscow, ‘a widow in purple’, was giving way to the openness and modernity of the new capital. Moscow embodied the old era of Asiatic despotism, Ivan the Terrible and the Time of Troubles. But St Petersburg would be the future. Peter spoke of a ‘great leap from darkness into light’. Italian and French architects were engaged to build splendid stone palaces, and the nobles were commanded to move to the new capital en masse.
Nothing could be clearer – Russia was becoming a European state, with all the implications that would have for the way it was governed and the way its people were treated. Now there would be an end to autocracy and repression; now there would be, if not democracy, then justice and the rule of law. Or would there?
The first clues that Peter’s reforms might not be all they seemed came in the very way he set about building his new capital. While the city rose, gleaming and splendid, its foundations – laid on gigantic crates of stones sunk by slave labourers into the boggy mire – were literally full of the dead. Peter knew his workforce was perishing by the tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands. He knew that punitive labour in the treacherous swamps, freezing weather, starvation and disease were causing human suffering on a massive scale. But he put the interests of the state above the interests of its people. What clearer image could there be of the survival of the old despotism even as it purported to introduce the new, ‘modern’, civilised Russia? Pushkin, the democrat and liberal, is so aware of this that by the end of ‘The Bronze Horseman’, his initial praise for Peter is tinged with horror:
He, who our city by the sea13 had founded,
Whose will was Fate – most terrible there
He sat, begirt with mist and air.
What hidden power and might he claims!
What fire on yonder horseback flames!
Proud charger, whither art thou ridden,
Where leapest thou? and where, on whom,
Wilt plant thy hoof? – Ah, lord of doom
Oh, potentate … in thy hold
A curb of iron, thou grasped of old
O’er Russia ’neath thy feet cast down …
In those bitter verses, learned by heart by generations of Russians, Pushkin is addressing – indeed berating – the iconic statue of Peter the Great, the tsar as Bronze Horseman, which stands on Senate Square in the centre of the city. Rising dramatically from a colossal block of granite, the horse’s front hooves are suspended perilously above the heads of those who walk beneath it. Peter’s hand is outstretched, as if ready to gallop forwards and upwards into the air. The Bronze Horseman has become a symbol of St Petersburg, of the city’s founder and all he stood for.
Pushkin clearly has an ambiguous view of Peter, and of autocrats in general. The hero of his poem, Yevgeny, is a representative of the common people – the malenky chelovek, (little man) – who bears the brunt of Peter’s megalomania, goes mad with anger and despair and, in a daring gesture of revolt, shakes his fist at the tsar on his horse:
About the statue, at its base14,
Poor mad Yevgeny circled, straining
His wild gaze upward at the face
That once o’er half the world was reigning.
Through his heart a flame was creeping
And in his veins the blood was leaping.
He halted sullenly beneath
The haughty statue; clenched his teeth,
And shuddered, whispering angrily,
‘Ay, architect, with thy creation
Of marvels … Ay, beware of me!’
And then, in wild precipitation
He fled. For now he seemed to see
The mighty Emperor, quietly,
With awesome anger burning,
His visage to Yevgeny turning!
In his fevered, despairing madness, Yevgeny hears the tsar’s bronze statue chasing him through St Petersburg, the horse’s dreadful hooves thundering on the cobbled squares and streets. Pushkin’s image of Peter as vengeful tyrant brutally crushing the hopes of the people is remarkable and chilling. But it is balanced by the poet’s unfeigned admiration for all that Peter achieved – the unsurpassed beauty that is St Petersburg and the transformation of Russia into a modern power oriented towards the Western world. It is true that Peter had much of the despot about him. But it was that very ruthlessness that allowed him to push through his drastic and urgently needed programme of modernisation in the face of stern resistance from a society unused to and suspicious of change.
I found the physical embodiment of one of Peter’s most significant changes in the costume section of the St Petersburg Hermitage Museum. On a chilly Monday in September, a curator took me to see the museum’s stores of eighteenth-century apparel, an array of ornate and painstakingly individuated uniforms, some with epaulettes, some with braid, all sewn from different-coloured silks and satins, and each one corresponding to a specific rank not in the army but in the vast civil bureaucracy Peter created. There were uniforms for ministers of state, civil councillors, borough surveyors, stewards, chamberlains, state registrars and collegiate registrars. Not only that, each rank15 had its own rights and privileges; each was assigned a specific title and form of address (‘Your Excellency’, ‘Your Nobleness’, ‘Your High Nobleness’ and so on) that had to be rigidly adhered to. It has been calculated that here were 262 distinct gradations of seniority. It was formalisation and codification on a grand scale.
But this was not merely organisation for organisation’s sake. Peter had a very real reason for introducing his new civil service system and at its heart was the country’s desperate need for order and accountability. For many centuries, Russia had been run as a capricious autocracy – the Tsar at the top, the people at the bottom and little in the way of civic institutions to mediate power between the two. Corrupt, often uneducated placemen appointed through connections and bribery wielded unchecked authority over justice, taxes and daily life. They took their cut from the money they raised from the people, and their abuses fostered resentment and unrest. The pernicious system of kormlenie – literally ‘feeding’ – had seen a long succession of tsars give their friends and favourites unchecked responsibility for administering a geographical region or a sector of the economy. The appointee would receive no salary, but he would have the right to enrich himself from the cash flow his activities generated. It was an unfettered licence to rip off the people.fn3
Peter the Great was the first tsar to recognise the problem. In a sense he was forced to do so. Russia’s system of governance had forfeited the trust of the people. A distinct lack of consent on the part of the ruled had resulted in popular revolts like that of Stenka Razin and the rebellion of the Old Believers. Peter’s response was to rebuild the system from head to toe. He set out to create the machinery of what he called ‘a regular state’, where things would work according to rules, where the will of the sovereign would be mediated by respected institutions, and tax farming replaced by equitable levies. His overriding aim was to engage the population in the interests of the state, to win their support by offering them a stake in society rather than by coercion; to replace resentment with patriotism and civic consciousness.
Peter abolished the old patronage system, the hereditary posts and privileges of the aristocracy, and instituted a new merit-based structure of civil administration.
The uniforms, grades and titles in the Hermitage Museum were the emblematic manifestations of Peter’s famous Table of Ranks, 14 rigidly defined steps of state service through which its members would progress by promotions based solely on personal accomplishments. From now on, there would be an end to string pulling and nepotism. The nobles would have to educate themselves, pass exams and serve in the new civil service, where precedence would depend on their performance and probity.
Peter’s vision of a ‘regular state’ meant eliminating abuses and corruption. Now regulation would replace the capricious rule of petty potentates. He wanted to strengthen the state and make sure it ran properly.fn4
Remarkably, commoners too were allowed to enter the meritocracy. They had to start at the lowest of the table’s 14 ranks, but for the first time ordinary people could aspire to advancement and a higher social station. Under Peter, recognition and rewards would be determined less by birth than by hard work and service to the tsar.
This was not, it should be stressed, democracy. There was no sense in which the people could influence either state policy or the selection of state officials. The tsar would still make those decisions. But Peter had decided it was in everyone’s interest that state policy should be implemented in a way that was seen as fair to all. It was certainly in his own interests because the old ways of corruption and abuse had brought the state to the point of crisis.
It might therefore be said that Peter was changing things so things could stay the same. His aim was to strengthen and ensure the survival of the autocratic tsarist system. But in order to do that, he knew he had to reform those elements of the system that were bringing his authority into disrepute and endangering its long-term prospects. It is an intriguing paradox and one encountered again with the reforms of Alexander II, Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev among others.
Peter, unsurprisingly, encountered vehement opposition from those who had prospered under the old system. One of the biggest bones of contention was his programme of Westernisation. When he ordered the nobility to dress in the Western manner, learn French and cut off their beards, many simply refused. So he responded with a ‘beard tax’ for anyone who failed to become a short-haired, clean-shaven European. Those who clung to the old forms of dress would be forced to change. The French writer Jean Rousset de Missy left a wry description of the battle of wills that ensued:
The Russians had always worn16 long beards, which they admired and took much care to preserve, letting them hang down on their chests, without even trimming their moustache … The tsar ordered that all except priests and peasants must pay a fine of a hundred roubles a year if they wanted to keep their beards, and the common people would have to pay one kopek each. Officials were posted at the gates of the towns to collect the tax. The Russians regarded the [anti-beard campaign] as a terrible sin on the part of the tsar because it was tantamount to an attack on their religion … As to the reform of clothes, the Russians’ garments, like those of the Orientals, were very long, reaching down to the ground. The tsar issued an ordinance banning that style of dress and commanding all the nobles to dress in the French fashion … A suit of clothes cut in the new style was hung at the gate of every city, with a decree commanding all except the peasants to have their clothes made on this model, upon penalty of being forced to kneel and have all of their garments which fell below the knee cut off by the city guards … Women’s dress was changed, too. English hairdressing was to replace caps and bonnets; bodices and skirts instead of the former undergarments … His Majesty set the example in all these changes.
If the attack on beards and kaftans symbolised a change in mindset, there were more substantive changes, too. Peter introduced compulsory education, making the children of nobles, clerks and officials study mathematics and geometry. And he sent young noblemen abroad to learn about the West, just as he himself had done. He opened diplomatic missions in major European capitals and invited foreign specialists to come and work in Russia. Jealousy of the incomers often spilt over into violence, but the tsar stood firm. He had opened the window, and the light from Europe was flooding in.
In perhaps his boldest move, Peter took steps to weaken the power of the Church. He abolished the post of patriarch and entrusted the running of Russian Orthodoxy to a council of clergy, which he himself partly controlled.fn5 Secular education was favoured over religious instruction, men under the age of 50 were banned from becoming monks, and the Church’s finances were deftly reformed to make it beholden to the state.
As a man, Peter gloried in authority, proclaiming himself emperor – Imperator Russorum – a reflection of his determination to have Russia recognised as a great power with a great empire, an aspiration that still resonates today. He succeeded in making Russia a Eurasian empire and a great European power, but only at the cost of the Orthodox Church and Russian nationhood.
When there was resistance to Peter’s reforms, he was quick and cruel in crushing it. After a rebellion by his elite guards, the Streltsy, Peter had a thousand of them tortured and executed, personally participating in the slaughter and hanging their corpses on street corners. He ordered his own son to be beaten and eventually beheaded, and he locked up his wife, his sister and his mistress in nunneries.
Discontent with Peter’s Westernising, and with his disrespect towards the Church, reached a head in 1708. Another peasant revolt, with ominous echoes of the Stenka Razin adventure, suggested strongly that the people still clung to an older, more conservative image of Russianness based on Christian Orthodoxy and the divine nature of the monarchy, which Peter had betrayed. The leader of the rebellion, a Cossack named Kondraty Bulavin, proclaimed that the tsar was the anti-Christ and urged the peasants to march against him. Peter had the insurgents massacred. Rather than address their legitimate concerns, he moved to make their conditions even harsher, tying the peasants to the land and making them in practice the property of their masters. Serfdom would be a millstone around Russia’s neck for another century and a half.
Was Peter a despot or a reformer? In many respects, he was both. He introduced Western standards of behaviour, but he used very un-Western methods to do so. He praised European values, but clung to Asiatic forms of governance. He rejected notions of parliamentary participation (something that was developing in Britain, for example, following the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights in 1688) and he pursued efficiency, not democracy. He knew change was vital because of the tensions in society – the peasant revolts were a symptom of a system straining at the seams – but he wanted to control that change, and he certainly didn’t want any reforms that would weaken the autocratic power he himself wielded.
Indeed, Peter’s reign saw the formulation of some of the most powerful justifications of autocracy as a system of government. The ‘Spiritual Regulations’, written in 1721 by Peter’s reforming Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich, state unequivocally that human beings are naturally selfish and disputatious. As a result, the firm hand of autocracy is necessary to restrain their inborn inclination towards conflict and anarchy. The argument, says Feofan17, is particularly applicable to Russia because ‘the nature of the Russian people is such that the country can be safeguarded only by autocratic rule. If another principle of government is adopted, it will be completely impossible to maintain its unity and wellbeing.’ Another Petrine thinker, Vasily Tatishchev, concurs. He advances the contention18 we first heard voiced in the time of Kievan Rus – that Russia’s borders are long and porous; that she is threatened by outside enemies; and that she therefore needs the unifying force of autocracy to prevent internal divisions leading to a weakening of national defences. These are the arguments that would form the ideological justification for autocracy for generations to come.
fn1 These verses from Yevtushenko’s poem were set powerfully to music in the 1960s by Dmitry Shostakovich, as ‘The Execution of Stepan Razin’. Both poem and cantata nominally celebrate the official Soviet version of Razin as a proto-socialist rebelling against tsarist autocracy. But, as with much of their work, Yevtushenko and Shostakovich knew it would have a deeper resonance: the autocrats were still in the Kremlin; they had merely traded in the tsarist crown for a Soviet red star.
fn2 One of Peter’s commanders, the Dane Vitus Bering, was dispatched to reconnoitre the eastern coast of Siberia, eventually landing in Alaska, just 50 miles across the strait that now bears his name. For the first time, two groups of European pioneers, one at the western extreme of their frontier, the other at the easternmost, would meet around the other side of the world from their starting point. With fur still a vital trading commodity, the quality of Alaskan sea otter pelts persuaded Moscow to colonise the new territory, and it remained in Russian hands until it was sold to America – for the derisory sum of $7 million11 – in 1867.
fn3 In some ways, the legacy of kormlenie lives on in the Russian lands. Today’s masters of the Kremlin reward their cronies with the chairmanship of the great national industries, from gas to oil to transport. They don’t own the industry per se, but they control its revenues, and the tales of bulging Swiss bank accounts are legion. Individuals who get in their way are quickly dealt with. The oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for instance, dared to challenge the Kremlin and found his company confiscated and himself in a Siberian jail.
fn4 His policies could be termed ‘statist’ in the same sense that Vladimir Putin – another autocratic Petersburger – put the supremacy of the state at the heart of his policy-making.
fn5 The council was chaired by a layman, whose appointment was decided by Peter himself.