Prof: Ok,
I want to talk about Peter the
Great today.
 
The Russian empire is one of
those empires that continued,
arguably--;not arguably,
it was the case--after the four
empires disappeared with World
War I.
The Russian empire continues,
though it continues under a
very different way with what
became the Soviet empire.
That's what it became.
 
With the end of the Soviet
Union in 1991-92,
the Soviet Empire collapsed,
the Soviet Union collapses,
and I guess the only remaining
empire in the world is that of
the United States,
which is a more informal
empire,
but still one that is out there
almost everywhere with the
military bases everywhere.
So, the rise and fall of
empires is obviously a theme of
this course.
 
The Russian empire,
the state of Muscovy had
already expanded greatly,
but it's really Peter the
Great,
it's the big guy who expanded
Russia,
its territorial size enormously.
Muscovy had been one of the
tributaries of the Mongols,
who sacked Kiev in the 1230s,
after pouring into Russia and
what now is Ukraine.
 
Muscovy was a princely state.
 
It gradually expanded in size,
reaching to the Southern Ural
Mountains and the Caspian Sea,
and emerging as a dynastic
state.
 
But yet Muscovy was
considerably less important than
the commonwealth of
Poland-Lithuania,
which was considerably much
greater and subject to struggles
with and influence by that
state.
What Peter the Great did was he
pushed back the neighbors who
had blocked the expansion of
Muscovy, that is Sweden,
who he defeats in a battle
worth noting in Poltava,
it's in the book, 1709,
Poland and the Ottoman Turks.
Peter the Great expands
territory beyond the Euro
mountains along the Caspian Sea
at the expense of the Turks.
Like all of his successors,
he dreamed of conquering the
Turkish capital of
Constantinople,
that is, Istanbul,
which would have given him
control of the Dardanelles
Straits there,
the passage between Europe and
Asia leading to the Black Sea.
All this stuff really matters,
because all these events now
with the problems in Georgia.
 
That's a very, very delicate,
strange situation,
where the great power now,
the United States,
finds itself rather
incongruously arguing that
Kosovo--which should be,
obviously, independent--I
remember going to Pec in Kosovo
when I was a kid--It's a little
hard to argue that Kosovo should
be independent and that what was
the territorial unit of Serbia
should not be respected.
I agree with this,
Kosovo should be independent.
And to argue that Tibet should
be free, and I agree with that.
Then to turn around and argue
that the people in Georgia,
who are not Georgians,
should not have the same rights
that the people in Kosovo have.
 
The whole thing--;the
presentation in the press is
absolutely hypocritical and just
bizarre.
But the only point of that
little diatribe in parentheses
was that the Black Sea really
does still matter a lot,
and that Peter the Great was
the first of the Russian czars
to dream of this access on to
the Black Sea and then finally
controlling the Straits of
Constantinople.
And Catherine the Great--they
all like to call themselves
"the Great"--She would
make this an important part of
her policy,
but she doesn't get there
either.
 
In the nineteenth century,
the Russian czars are still
trying to get there as well.
 
Peter's new fleet,
we'll talk about his new fleet,
which he oversaw and,
in a very minor way,
helped build himself,
sails down the Don River in
1698 and takes the Turkish port
of Azov, A-Z-O-V,
on the Sea of Azov.
 
This gave them access to the
Black Sea.
But then they're forced to back
up.
They lose, and they're forced
to surrender Azov to the Turks
after an unsuccessful war.
 
So, Peter the Great,
despite his dramatic expansion
of the Russian empire,
does not get this outlet on the
Black Sea.
 
But what does change,
and what the battle represents
is, of course,
Poltava--is that Russia's
participation in European
affairs had been totally
minimal.
 
There's a story often told,
indeed told in the book that
you're kind enough to read,
that--I think it was Louis
XIV's equivalent of minister of
foreign affairs--sends a formal
letter to a Russian czar--it
couldn't have been Louis XIV,
but one of those dudes--it
might have been--he sends a
letter to a czar who had been
dead for twelve years.
Russia was that far away.
 
It was not in the consciousness
of the great powers.
But after one of Peter's
victories,
the Russian ambassador in
Vienna reported that the news of
Peter's victory,
people began to fear the czar
as they feared Sweden formerly.
 
It's very difficult for us to
imagine a fear of Sweden.
But that fear--the last
real--Gustavus Adolphus,
during the Thirty Years' War,
was the last really major
Swedish interlude in the
continental European affairs,
although Poltava doesn't come
until 1709, so
voilà.
 
But what he does is that
there's no other European state
expanding their empires
overseas,
in the case of the Spanish and
the English,
that adds so much territory on
land to its empire.
Between the 1620s and the
1740s, the land of the Russian
empire increases from 2.1
million square miles to 5.9
million square miles.
 
Now, to be sure,
in Siberia in the far reaches
of the north,
North Asia,
this empire amounted to little
more than a series of trading
posts,
and it took a very long time
for any semblance of Russian
authority from Moscow and soon
from St.
 
Petersburg, for reasons that
we'll see, to reach there.
But nonetheless,
Peter the Great creates this
huge empire that will have,
over the long run,
an enormous influence in
European affairs.
Because, after all,
European Russia is part of
Europe and will have an enormous
influence on Asian affairs as
well.
 
Witness the Russo-Japanese War
in 1904-1905 that the Russians
lose.
 
This is a key moment in the
evolution of revolutionary
politics in Russia as we shall
see a little later on.
Now, what about Peter the Great?
 
I used to ask my friend Paul
Bushkovitch to come in and give
the lecture,
and I got so interested in it
that I did some reading on my
own---Lindsey Hughes and various
other people put this together
last semester--because he is not
a terribly engaging or warm
personality in many ways,
since he enjoyed watching
people being tortured,
including his own son;
but, he is an interesting
person.
 
One of the things he does,
and I guess this is one of the
things to be put in neon from
this lecture,
is he opens up Russia,
which had no secular influences
at all, to western ideas.
 
This is an extraordinarily
important and transforming
accomplishment of Peter the
Great.
He emerges from the violent
world of Boyars.
Boyars are the nobles;
the Junkers are the Prussian
nobles.
 
Boyars, B-O-Y-A-R,
are the Russian nobles and
royal politics.
 
Peter was the first child of
his father's second wife and
thus a potential threat to the
ambition of the relatives of the
first wife.
 
His mother and her allies among
the Boyars, that is the nobles,
overthrew the regents in 1689.
 
Peter's rule is from 1682 until
his death in 1725.
There were no strict rules for
the succession of the czar.
It's basically just kind of an
uncomely family battle royal,
in which there were bloody
settlings of scores.
There was no foreign minister.
 
The Boyars' counsel,
that is the counsel of the
nobles, literally met in the
throne of the palace.
It became known as the Duma.
 
Eventually in 1905,
Nicholas II will be forced to
grant a Duma,
an assembly to Russia.
Then he withdraws,
eliminates basically all of its
rights, and then the Duma will
come back later on.
Peter is one of those cases in
European history where one
person's personality and
interest does make an enormous
difference.
 
He is an absolute ruler.
 
He can do what he damn well
pleases.
He is personally responsible
for the reforms,
the opening up of Russia to a
considerable extent to western
European ideas.
 
This is something that he does
himself.
As a boy, he was very smart and
he was very interested in
science.
 
He always wanted to know how
things worked.
He was fascinated with
astrolabes and was interested in
sailing.
 
Russia doesn't have a port.
 
He's interested in sailing and
learns about sailing on lakes,
and ponds, and rivers.
 
It does have a port,
but it's frozen all the time.
His travels took him into
contact with observatories,
museums, hospitals,
botanical gardens.
He's fascinated by gardens.
 
When he goes to Europe on his
big sortie,
on his big-boy trek through
Europe, he goes around and he
visits all of these botanical
gardens.
He sketches things.
 
He's constantly sketching the
way things work,
the way things are.
 
He had this intellectual
curiosity that defied the kind
of orthodox religious skepticism
about any kind of rational
belief.
 
This permeated not only the
Russian Orthodox Church,
but it permeates the Catholic
Church as well.
Look what happens to Galileo,
who was lucky enough to have
been burned at the stake by his
friend, the pope.
He was interested in math and
in geography,
and thus in maps and map
making.
What he does is he takes this
archaic state structure in which
literally nothing had been
written down.
It's all just passed down from
word to mouth.
He transforms Russia into an
European absolute monarchy with
much in common with Frederick
the Great, with Sweden,
with Austria,
the Austria of the Hapsburgs,
with Spain, and with France.
 
He tries not only to copy
European absolutism,
but to open up Russia to
commerce,
realizing that trade meant
wealth and that wealth meant
improvements in the lives of the
Russian people.
More about that in a while.
 
He makes Russia a military
power.
Indeed, arguably a modern
military power,
at least in the seventeenth and
early eighteenth-century sense,
and he injects European culture
into Russia.
Now, just as an aside,
but it's one that we'll come
back to particularly in your
reading,
the tension in Russia between
an absolute repugnance for
western influence and the
constant assertion that Russia's
traditional ways of doing things
are the right way of doing
things,
long identified with people who
would be called Slavophiles.
 
Their tensions with
westernizers would last right
through Russian intellectual
history in the nineteenth
century.
 
I remember when I was a student
of one of the biggest classes at
the University of Michigan--go
blue!
I am so sad this weekend--it
was Russian intellectual
history.
 
We would read the Slavophiles,
and we'd read the westernizers,
taught by the late scholar of
Russia, Arthur Mendel.
It was fabulous to read these
people as they debated what will
happen to Russia,
the kind of westernizers and
those in between.
 
A lot of them were writing from
Paris in the nineteenth century.
Some of them were great,
great writers.
There was this kind of
intellectual energy.
But it came down to this theme
that still is so important,
and was already so important,
which is, what is Russian that
should be kept uniquely Russian
and closed to outside influence?
And what is Russian that should
be modified by being open to
non-religious influences that
come from other places?
This is not just a uniquely
Russian tale,
as you can see.
 
What about Peter himself?
 
Somebody figured out that he
was at least 6'7".
Now, that's just huge.
 
That's tiny in the NBA now.
 
But the guards,
the "giants,"
they were called,
who guarded Frederick the Great
were giants because they were
six feet tall.
The average person was about
5'3" or 5'4"
in France.
 
Napoleon, who was always
considered to be kind of a
dwarf, a midget,
really wasn't at all.
He was just sort of corpulent.
 
He was the average kind of
increasingly corpulent.
He was the average height of
most people in France.
Peter the Great was a big guy,
6'7".
He had extremely small hands,
very small feet,
which meant he sort of lurched
and stumbled sometimes when he
walked,
particularly because he drank
enormous quantities.
 
He had these odd kind of facial
ticks that he couldn't really
help at all.
 
We don't have a documentary
showing Peter the Great in
action, for obvious reasons.
 
But the people that he visited
when he was snatching huge
roasts off the table at the
fancy parties in London
commented on these facial ticks
that he had that would bend his
face.
 
He had a misshapen lower lip
and his head sometimes when he
was talking would seem convulsed
to the right.
It would move to the right all
the time.
He was so much bigger than
everybody else,
so people really were not taken
aback,
because this was a time when
physical imperfections were
commonplace.
 
You couldn't go anywhere
without seeing people who nature
had given, in many ways,
a very bad deal along with
crushing poverty.
 
But the fact that Peter was a
czar and was rather scary in his
temperament, because he had a
rather bad temper,
too, meant that he could be
alarming.
He could be scary.
 
His generosity was legend,
but so was his cruelty.
Several times at public
executions in 1698 and 1699,
he brushed the executioner
away,
grabbed the axe and did the
dirty work himself,
chopping off a head or two.
 
In 1718, he ordered a man kept
alive after being horribly
tortured, so he could be
tortured some more and suffer as
long as humanly possible.
 
All officials from the
chancelleries that he had
created and all of the officers
were obliged to attend this
torture scene as a way of
warning them that,
"You'd better not mess
around."
Remember, this is a time,
as we'll see in a while,
where the czar was on the road
a lot, and distances in the
Russian empire are enormous.
 
When he is gone from Moscow and
then St.
Petersburg, there was always
this tendency to have these sort
of cabales,
to get together and sort of
plot.
 
His son has the bad idea of
getting involved in this later,
as we shall see.
 
Yet there were incidents that
his merciful side came through
as well.
 
But when it came to treason,
he was less likely to be
merciful, as the case of Alexis,
his ill-fated son would
demonstrate.
 
One thing is clear.
 
Peter the Great had an enormous
ambivalence about his role and
his image as a czar.
 
His second wife was a Latvian
peasant maid.
This horrified the Boyars,
who thought that this was
unbecoming.
 
How can you marry a Latvian to
begin with, if you're a Russian
and marry somebody who was a
commoner?
He was capable,
and there are a lot of
paintings of him dressing up and
playing the role of a czar,
dressing in fancy clothes.
 
But there are more images of
him identified with horribly
worn boots with his toes
sometimes sneaking through at
the end that seemed to reflect
his great personal thrift,
wearing stockings, it was said,
that he darned himself,
and a battered hat that he kept
on wearing that he had worn at
the Battle of Poltava in 1709,
complete with a bullet hole
that supposedly tore through it,
missing his head.
He liked the company of
ordinary people.
This was a constant trait.
 
He identified himself with the
Russian people.
More about this in a while.
 
He avoided carriages.
 
He liked to walk.
 
He would leave the carriage
behind, dismissing carriage
drivers who were more
well-dressed than he was and his
guards.
 
He ignored carefully-crafted
seating plans at dinner.
He jumped from table to table,
eating standing up--he didn't
like to sit down very much,
his back hurt--;or walking
around.
 
He couldn't stay still very
long.
When he was lodged,
he liked living in your basic
Russian, wooden,
peasant house,
such as you could find on the
outskirts of Moscow.
One of the things that's very
true about Moscow,
right into the twentieth
century,
is that you had all sorts of
peasants living on the edge of
Moscow living in these wooden
houses.
He liked that.
 
He said he slept well in these
wooden houses and that probably
is because of his very unhappy
childhood listening to relatives
shouting at each other and
plotting to kill each other in
the big house.
 
And he never liked Moscow.
 
We'll see more about that in a
minute,
in part because of its
overwhelming religious influence
and that's one reason,
besides the quest for a port on
the sea,
why he builds St. Petersburg
When traveling abroad,
he refused the fancy lodgings
that were reserved for such
distinguished visitors.
In 1717 in Paris,
Lindsey Hughes reports,
he went to a private house
instead of the Louvre palace.
The museum had a big palace,
which is, as I said before,
where the small boy,
Louis XIV, lived,
and then was burned in 1871.
 
Instead he just went and rented
a private house and fell asleep
almost immediately.
 
He loved sleeping on ships;
he thought that the rocking of
the waves rocked him to sleep,
so he liked doing that.
Legend has him eating peasant
food--cabbage soup,
porridge,
meat with pickled cucumbers,
ham and cheese,
and kvass, which is a drink
that I've actually tasted from
fermented black bread.
But he was not indifferent to
foreign food.
Somebody found an order.
 
He ordered 200 bottles of
Hermitage wine.
Hermitage is a really wonderful
and now just horribly overpriced
wine from the Drôme,
on the left bank of the Rhone
not very far away from where we
live.
But it's totally out of price.
 
But Hermitage was a wine that
was known by connoisseurs in the
seventeenth and eighteenth
century, and ever since then.
For all the talk about eating
cabbage and eating with ordinary
people, even then Hermitage cost
a lot of money.
He ordered 200 good bottles of
Hermitage wine.
So, voilà.
 
I wish I had been invited to
these things.
He was very informal.
 
There is this legend that he
used to grab these huge chunks
of meat and started gnawing on
them like he would on a hotdog
or something like that at a
Yankee game,
except that other people were
already dressed up and the meat
and the gravy was flying over
them as he just sort of walked
around gnawing on this stuff.
 
Sofia Charlotte of
Brandenburg--I don't know who
the hell that is,
but it's got to be some royal
hanger-on--wrote that "It
is evident that he has not been
taught how to eat
properly."
But she liked his natural
manner and informality.
King Frederick of Denmark found
him ill-mannered and
inappropriate.
 
He liked to masquerade.
 
Again, this is his personal
ambivalence about his own role,
hanging around with ordinary
people, sleeping in peasant
lodgings and that sort of thing.
 
He liked to dress up as a
sailor.
One thing that he always did
when he went on his grand tour
is he always took fake names,
as if he was signing into a
hotel as Mr.
 
and Mrs. John Smith.
 
He would take the name of a
commoner.
He didn't sign into a hotel as
Peter the Great or whatever,
but he would go in with a name
that wasn't his.
Again, this is just his
personal ambivalence about who
he was, and his uncertainty
about the role that he had in
his own family.
 
So, this was a play-acting that
was part of his life.
These ornate masquerades and
charades that are part of his
complexity reveal something
about his identity.
Then when you see these
portraits of him,
he looks very czar-like.
 
He looks like one of these
royal people that were painted
all the time.
 
In 1697 he goes west with the
name of Peter Michaeloff.
Even in his own account books,
which he kept very carefully
about how much money he spent.
 
He wasn't radin,
he wasn't a cheapskate.
But he paid attention to royal
expenses, personal expenses.
He refers to himself with a
variety of names and titles,
as captain this,
colonel that,
general that.
 
He's not trying to hide his
identity to the future.
It was very obvious who he was.
 
His handwriting is recognized
by experts.
But role-playing takes on
dimensions of the state.
I mentioned,
I don't remember in what
context, the other day that the
most famous example is the
drunken assembly.
 
It's sort of a mock parallel
government with his buddies.
It has personnel who are his
buddies, those in favor,
lots of eating,
drinking, et cetera.
It has its statutes,
sort of the mock constitution,
and its rituals that involve
basically getting wasted.
Again, this is part of his
split personality about who he
was.
 
If Hughes is correct,
this is part of him saying that
being a czar is more than just
dressing up,
and playing the role,
and going to fancy dances,
and hanging around with fancy
people who don't do a damn
thing.
 
You have to do the work.
 
You have to walk the walk.
 
That he did.
 
You had to manifest strength,
and firmness,
and bravery,
and worthy deeds that would be
recognized as being real deeds
by contemporaries.
He constantly warns his son,
who was kind of an n'er do
well,
that, "You better work
hard," or,
"You better work a little
harder and pay more attention to
what you're doing.
You'd better care about
military things more than you
do.
 
This is what I'm telling you
you'd better do.
You'd better listen to what I'm
doing."
But sometimes he would drink a
lot and eat a lot because he
just needed to relax.
 
Being a czar was a busy job.
 
He got up at 4:00 in the
morning.
He was at his office before
anybody else was.
People began,
like in any business,
to be attentive to whether or
not they were early enough.
"Does he see me that I am
still here when it's getting
dark?"
 
Of course, it gets dark in the
winter in St.
Petersburg about noon.
 
But anyway, he loved practical
things.
He loved firefighting,
for example.
He had a passion for fireworks,
explosives, cannon fire.
He played the drums.
 
He loved dancing and he loved
religious singing.
He loved the choir music of
Russian Orthodox services.
He loved to play chess and he
loved to play billiards.
And, as I already said,
he loved mathematical
instruments and telescopes.
 
He carried a telescope with him
wherever he went.
He knew how to use it and he
knew what he was looking for.
He loved globes.
 
He loved to see where things
were.
He liked to see that they
mapped parts of Siberia that
people didn't know what was
there.
It was rather like parts of
Africa before the 1880s.
You see these big blanks,
because nobody had ever been
there.
 
He was interested in that.
 
He was self-taught.
 
You didn't have to go to some
fancy school if you were a czar,
to be a czar in training.
 
You had tutors,
as all these folks did.
He made spelling mistakes,
which you can see.
I don't read Russian,
but he made spelling mistakes
when he wrote.
 
His handwriting was awful.
 
Bad handwriting is the nemesis
of historians,
to be sure.
 
But he built a private library,
and it wasn't just full of
religious books.
 
It was practical books about
fortifications,
hydraulics, artillery,
navigation, and shipbuilding.
But he also sang religious
music.
He had many religious books,
the kind of standard liturgical
texts that were the stuff of
religious enthusiasm,
and more modern theological
works in the Russian Orthodox
tradition.
 
Another point about this sort
of ambivalence about being czar
is that he often made a point of
choosing his most trusted
advisors from the ranks of
commoners and gave them the
right to become titled after a
certain amount of time in the
royal bureaucracy.
 
But sometimes he had a tendency
to pick people whom he liked a
lot but were totally
unqualified, military commanders
who weren't very good.
 
But what he does is he cuts off
Russian absolutism from this
totally religious culture that
represented 100 percent of the
official culture,
in a real sense the
culture of pre-Petrian,
that is pre-Peter, Russia.
Russian culture was entirely
religious.
If you went to Poland,
where I go often,
as I've said before,
if you went to Krakow,
where Copernicus worked--I've
been in Copernicus' workroom,
and it's absolutely
fantastic--in Krakow you had a
major university.
 
It was an important center of
learning, a diffusion of
scientific ideas in the
scientific revolution and later
of Enlightenment ideals.
 
In Vilnius, which is the
capital of Lithuania,
you had a university as well.
 
But there wasn't a university
in Russia.
There was no equivalent of the
Royal Society that you're
reading about in London that was
very important in the diffusion
of the scientific revolution.
 
There's nothing like the
Académie des sciences,
the Academy of Sciences in
Paris, which was founded in
1666.
 
There's no legal tradition,
so there's no law school.
There's no medical school.
 
There's no secular culture.
 
Ninety-percent of all the books
that were published before Peter
were devotional texts in the
church.
There was no word literally in
Russian for the state,
or for the monarchy,
or for the government.
They did not exist.
 
The state was an abstraction,
but in the person of the czar
it was a reality.
 
Now, the Boyars,
in the 1660s and the 1670s,
some of them began to learn
Latin and Polish.
Diplomacy is still in Latin
until the end of the seventeenth
century and then,
as you know,
it becomes French.
 
So, what about his
accomplishments,
besides the ones I've already
mentioned, to which I will
return in a little bit.
 
Muscovy had already conquered
the Volga basin in the sixteenth
century, where the nomadic
Tatars were, T-A-T-A-R-S.
This is important,
because it's the black earth
region of rich agriculture
there.
What happens in Russia is what
happens in Prussia,
as well, and in other parts of
Eastern Europe,
particularly in the Hapsburg
domains--you have,
to make a very bad pun,
a resurfacing of the region by
people forced into serf
contracts.
Not contracts.
 
They become legally part of the
land, literally.
This follows the arrival of the
expansion of serfdom.
Serfdom expands along with the
Russian empire.
They already held Siberia and
they reached the Pacific Ocean
in the 1640s.
 
So, I already said what the
number of square miles that were
increased, but it increases from
six to sixteen million of the
population.
 
They expand north to Archangel,
so this gives them a port,
but a frozen one.
 
And, as I already said,
south and southeast to the
expense of the Turks.
 
But Peter wanted a navy.
 
It's sort of circular reasoning.
 
If you want to have a navy,
you have to have a port.
And if you're going to have a
port, then you have to have a
navy.
 
Why not?
 
He first built a navy on rivers
using Dutch shipmasters from
Amsterdam.
 
He once said that if he wasn't
the czar of all the Russians,
what he would want to be would
be an English admiral.
He learned Dutch--and Dutch is
a very difficult language--in
1696,
while the Turkish war went on,
or one of them,
he went off to Western Europe
incognito as an embassy soldier.
 
Again, it was part of his
gamesmanship,
his pretend games.
 
There he learned carpentry in a
very serious way.
He went to the Leiden Medical
School, because he wanted to see
how you dissected bodies.
 
He went there, too.
 
Then he went to London,
along the Thames,
the major port of the world
then, along with Amsterdam.
He learned shipbuilding there
as well.
Because the building of ships
was,
to him, the application of
rationality,
of reason, thinking,
and experimentation,
this got him interested in the
scientific revolution.
There's nothing too surprising
about that.
The essence of the scientific
revolution.
He may have even attended a
Quaker meeting,
but we're not sure about that.
 
The problem was if you have a
basically landlocked power and
want to get to the sea,
then you'd better have a navy.
He'd learned to sail when he
was young, but on the river.
This also, by the way,
gets him interested in Baroque
and these kinds of Baroque
masquerades that he had back in
Moscow and then in St.
 
Petersburg as well.
 
So, in all of this,
what he does is he makes,
to use an expression that I've
already used before in the
context of absolutism,
he makes the Boyars,
while he's building his navy
and expanding Russia,
he makes the Boyar junior
partners in absolutism.
That phrase again.
 
Now, there are only about
200-300 Boyar families.
They own, by the way,
40,000 serfs,
own 40,000 serfs,
just these 200 to 300 families.
They build huge houses in the
seventeenth century in Moscow
with very old-fashioned
traditional Russian
architecture.
 
The Russian empire was rather
like Charlemagne's empire in 800
in the coronation at Aachen or
Aix-la-Chapelle and all of that.
You have this bureaucracy
that's--it's not really a
bureaucracy,
but you've got these royal
officials representing the royal
will,
but the actual impact in this
vast expanse of the Russian
empire isn't that great.
 
There's nobody telling people
what to do on a day-to-day or
even a month-to-month basis.
 
Yet there's an enhanced sense
of obligation to the czar of all
the Russian people.
 
There's an advanced sense of
state and of organization.
That also is one of the things
to put in neon.
He creates committees of
advisors that,
in many ways,
are not that different than the
kinds of ministries that would
evolve in western absolute
rulers--absolute states,
and in non-absolute states as
well.
 
By 1708 and 1709 he has created
a more European-style
administration for this vast
empire.
He wants to build a capital
city.
That's where St.
 
Petersburg comes from.
 
It had been Swedish territory,
and his victories give him this
land.
 
I once went to visit the summer
palace that he created and that
Nicholas II loved so much there.
 
He constructs this new capital.
 
What's important about the
construction of St.
Petersburg--I don't know how
many of you have ever been
there;
I haven't been there for a
very, very long time--this city
is not like Moscow at all.
When you look at Moscow you see
these old traditional,
the skyline is dominated by
churches, the influence of the
Russian Orthodox Church.
 
St.
 
Petersburg is completely
different.
It is an example of classic
great power, absolute urban
planning.
 
It has a long boulevard,
the Nevski Prospect,
very important in 1917.
 
The most dominant buildings are
not churches;
they are state buildings.
 
They are state structures.
 
It's a different place.
 
It reminds you of Madrid.
 
It reminds you of Berlin.
 
It reminds you of Versailles
and it reminds you of the
post-Haussman Paris,
that is, post 1850s and 1860
Paris.
 
It is an example of what I call
the imperialism of the straight
line,
where you have large boulevards
that you can march armies down
to,
reviewing stands and all of
that,
totally different than Moscow.
 
The religious leaders did not
like Peter, because Peter is
bringing in to Russian culture
foreign elements.
They were already suspicious of
the implementation or the
annexation of Baroque religious
forms,
architectural forms and
liturgical influences from
Austria and from Central Europe,
and now they've got a guy who's
telling the Boyars' women to
dress like western European
women.
 
At a time when beards meant a
great deal religiously,
he's telling the men to shave
off their beards.
He's telling the men to wield
forks and knives as well as
weapons, and to adopt
non-Russian customs,
to bring them into Russia.
 
There's tremendous tension with
the church.
But he remains--he is a true
believer, but he is bringing
into Russian religious culture
changes that were deeply
resented.
 
Some aristocrats began to put
on western style wigs,
such as you could find at the
court of Versailles.
Women had to wear high heels
and they were tottering along
and falling on the cobblestones
wearing high heels and European
style dresses.
 
He promulgates decrees as czar
about daily life.
This is a big transformation.
 
As to his son,
his son was more under the
influence of these traditional
religious influences.
He is plotting against his own
father.
Peter, on one of his trips,
has to return back to Russia.
In 1716 and 1718 Alexis had
taken his mother's side in the
divorce and did not like the
Latvian peasant second wife.
He also didn't like military
service.
He was lazy.
 
His father said,
"I see you are spending
more of your time in idleness
than in taking care of business
at this crucial time."
 
But Alexis doesn't get the
point.
He begins to plot in various
ways with dissident Boyars.
He goes off and gets the
support of the emperor of
Austria to wage a war against
his own father.
Terrible idea.
 
When he returns,
his father orders him tortured.
Under torture,
Alexis--who probably dies of
cold, not of torture,
in a very frozen cell-- named
Boyar accomplices.
 
These people are toast,
obviously.
The son probably died of TB,
but it related to all this
other business in his weakened
state.
That was the end of the son.
 
But what lasted longer than
Alexis was the Europeanization
of Russian culture.
 
Peter the Great has books
translated from the west,
including John Locke,
into Russian.
This, itself,
was a remarkable
accomplishment.
 
After all, the Russian Orthodox
churchmen had not been
interested in the Renaissance at
all, not interested in the
scientific revolution at all;
and, by 1710,
Russian students are being sent
abroad to foreign universities,
particularly in Italy,
but also in France and in
England.
 
They're studying practical
things like marble work,
and metal work,
and copper work,
and not just shipbuilding.
 
They're also studying the life
of the mind.
In a way, it's possible to
argue,
which is what I'm arguing and
I'm not the first to do it,
but Peter the Great was,
in many ways,
himself a child of European
rationalism,
of a scientific culture of
rationality and of,
at least in the earlier stages,
the Enlightenment.
He was not against the church,
but he thought that people were
wasting time being monks,
and other people were all over
the place in their Russian
Orthodox equivalent.
He believed whatever one wag
once set of monks,
"I sleep,
I eat, I digest,"
and they prayed,
of course.
To him this was not useless,
because it didn't serve the
state.
 
It didn't serve the dynastic
interests of the dynasty,
which he identified with the
Russian people.
He did not ever imagine the
abandonment of the table of
ranks,
which set everybody in a
hierarchy,
not for a minute--we're talking
about the end of the end of the
seventeenth and eighteenth
century.
 
But he believed that it was
important to take the tools of
science,
to take the tools of rational
thought and apply them to the
good of the state,
even if you saw that good of
the state as in ships that could
lob cannonballs even further
against hostile ships,
and that kind of thing.
 
But he founds the first Russian
museum, the first school of
navigation, the first school of
this and that.
There are 100 times more books,
pamphlets, prints,
and maps produced in Russia
under the time of Peter the
Great than there had been in the
whole previous century.
Peter, as Lindsey Hughes has
argued,
was highly suspicious of any
alternative to state service,
especially the monastic way of
life,
which I've already said.
 
But he thought that it should
be channeled through state
obligations, be there taxes or
labor duties.
At the same time,
he's equally suspicious of the
godless.
 
So, he remained very Russian,
but it was the importation of
more western ways of looking at
things that were very important.
He wrote once that,
"The chief thing is to
know your duties and our edicts
by heart and not put off things
until tomorrow,"
like his son did.
"For how can a state
government exist if edicts are
not put into use?"
 
et cetera, et cetera.
 
Their lives should be better.
 
The concept of the state was
fundamentally new to Russia,
but gradually came into
existence, and his
accomplishments had a lot to do
with that.
He wrote his son in 1704,
he said, "I may die
tomorrow, but be sure that you
have little pleasure if you fail
to follow my example.
 
You must love everything that
contributes to the glory and
honor of the fatherland.
 
You must love loyal advisors
and servants,
whether they be foreigners or
our own people,
and spare no effort to serve
the common good."
The common good comes right out
of enlightened thought.
It comes out of Locke and those
folks.
"If my advice is lost in
the wind and you do not do as I
wish, I do not recognize you as
my son."
That, in the end,
is what came in the long run.
He remained a fanatically
Russian patriot,
the father of his people.
 
His admiration for foreign
things and approaches was
tempered by, as Hughes argues,
his devotion to Russia,
which he oversaw.
 
The common good became a real
concept and one that,
unfortunately,
some of his successors didn't
take terribly seriously.
 
In conclusion,
he defiantly,
deliberately,
and effectively broke with
tradition.
 
In doing so he made himself
sort of an outsider to
traditional Russian ways of
looking at this thing.
This ambivalence that was part
of his personal life,
the way he lived,
would be a constant theme in
subsequent Russian and still,
in many ways, is today.
Between Slavophiles and
westernizers,
those are the people that look
inside Russia to finding what
they think to be eternal truth
and those people who want to
temper such looks with a look to
the west.
That, in neon,
is what Peter the Great did
above all and for which he shall
most be remembered.
Next time to the Enlightenment,
and some people whom you might
not think of at first glance
would seem terribly enlightened.
See you on Wednesday.
 
