PETRUS PRIMUS ET CATHARINA SECUNDA

There are two inscriptions on Étienne Maurice Falconet’s magnificent monument to Russia’s glory, Mednyi Vsadnik, the Bronze Horseman, commissioned by Catherine the Great to honor her great predecessor Peter the Great,--- one in Russian and one in Latin, amounting to the same thing. The Latin one reads: “Petro Primo Catharina Secunda MDCCLXXXII.” It’s therefore wonderfully appropriate to allude to this terse inscription in the title of the present entry, dedicated to the two Russian Greats, Peter I and Catherine II.

For anybody who wishes to read their biographies, I recommend reading books, reference literature, and the millions of reference sources on the Internet--- all with various degrees of caution, I might add. My purpose here, however, is not to offer their life stories, but more in line with the leitmotif of the ongoing discussion. The current question of interest continues to be Russia and the Foreigners.

There is no point in talking yet again about how foreign to Russia Peter the Great may have been, by blood. In his case, what matters most is his urgent desire to open Russia to the foreigners, allowing them to pour in, carrying along with their luggage, a tide of Westernizing influence that was to change Russia’s face forever. In hindsight, was it a good thing or a bad thing?

The same goes for Catherine the Great. In her case, her total foreignness by birth is established beyond any trace of a doubt, but what is important is that in her policies she continued Peter’s Westernizing legacy, and so, again, was it a good thing or a bad thing?

There is very little disagreement among the Russians that in both cases it had to be essentially a very good thing. Otherwise, they would have had to reject and repudiate their whole history, from Rurik to date. But there is a much more interesting question of whether Peter’s Westernization was the result of a triumph of the Russian cultural liberals over the cultural conservatives, or else, that in the depth of their Russianness, both these groups were subconsciously united. The latter point is naturally, the one, which I uphold, and a brief discussion of it is very much in order now.

Traditional quasi-historians of Russia in the West see Russian history as an ongoing battle of the so-called Slavophiles (or Russophiles), the conservatives, against the Cosmopolitans, the liberals, who wish to bring Russia into the family of Western nations, where it belongs, in their enlightened opinion.
While there is some truth in that distinction, it easily becomes a black-and-white issue, maintaining that an organic combination of these two principles, a sort of “yin and yang” inhabiting the same body, is virtually impossible, as if such an idea in itself were philosophically incomprehensible. Needless to say, it is exactly as I see it. A true Russian patriot is never afraid of a beneficial foreign influence, as he (or she) feels totally secure about the political, cultural and spiritual integrity of Russia’s abiding national soul.

Peter the Great was not a Europe-thirsty Cosmopolitan who yearned Western culture and know-how at all costs and at the expense of Russia’s native culture. In a very distinct sense, he was both a Russophile and a Cosmopolitan at the same time. Furthermore, he must have carried within him a definite sense of Russian national greatness, that made her impervious to any such thing as cultural hijacking, whether voluntary or involuntary, which would easily have been the lot of an inferior culture, succumbing to a superior culture, regardless of who was the victor between them in the political sense.

By the same token, Catherine II was not called the Great by the Russians for nothing. Although a complete foreigner in every tangible sense of the word, she became consummately Russian in her keen understanding of the Russian culture, and in identifying herself with it. Whether in “becoming Russian” she had stopped being a German, or her German origin may have actually contributed to her fusion into the Russian mold, is not something that is possible to discuss without first building a necessary foundation for such a discussion. It is reasonable to expect that in the future I may be addressing this question at some length, but, certainly, it is not something I intend to hurry into, at the expense of everything else, at this time.

My last point of this entry goes to the question of the consistency of the dual nature of the Russian soul with that nation’s global mission. It is impossible to imagine The Third Rome in a frenzy of xenophobia, but it is equally unimaginable for The Third Rome to lack a profound sense of national pride and self-worth, which makes xenophobia (being a self-protective mechanism more than anything else) completely unnecessary and even foolish. Xenophobia and xenophilia are, therefore, empty words in the Russian great-power context.

The genuine Russian sentiment toward foreigners is best capsulated in the 1938 movie Alexander Nevsky, in Alexander’s immortal words, paraphrasing the Bible, and addressed to the defeated Germans:

“Go tell all in foreign lands that Russia lives! Those who come to us in peace will be welcome as guests. But those who come to us with sword in hand will die by the sword! On that Russia stands, and forever shall we stand!”