There are so many entries in this book already directly or indirectly linked to Peter the Great that there is no terrible need to add an extra one, except to fill in Peter’s legitimate space in the chronological sequence of my Russian historical entries in this subsection. I am however naturally compelled to imbue it with a different substance, which in this case is Peter’s connection to his wife and future Empress Catherine I.
First a few words about Peter in profuse addition to all those already said about him. Just like with Comrade Stalin, it is demonstrably uninstructive to seek an objective opinion of him among Peter’s contemporaries--- either among his apologists, or among his victims and detractors.
Among his foreign admirers in later times, Voltaire stands out not so much by the abundance of his praise as by the intellectual quality and authority of his assessment. His writings about Peter are voluminous. In 1759, he published the first volume, followed by the second volume in 1763, of his History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great, where he summarizes his historical assessment of Peter as follows (this isn’t a quote, but a mere paraphrase):
The greatest value of Peter’s reforms is that the progress that the Russians were able to achieve in 50 years could not have been achieved by other nations in 500 years.
Voltaire and Rousseau had a famous disagreement about Peter and his reforms, which obviously reinforces the importance of their subject as a high value subject.
Generally speaking, it is not at all surprising to find glowing assessments of Peter’s reign in historiographies, both East and West. Sergei Solovyev in that sense adds little intrigue to the debate about Peter’s legacy. It is all the more unusual that the great historian of pre-revolutionary Russia Nikolai Karamzin (1766- 1826) is unequivocally critical of the great Peter. He accuses him of an inordinate infatuation with things foreign, of his determination to turn Russia into a Netherlands. He complains that the radical change of the old way of Russian life was not always justified, and that as a result, Russia’s educated classes “became citizens of the world, but stopped being, in some cases, citizens of Russia.” Karamzin’s complaint is in fact understandable as an emerging nationalist reaction to the excesses of cosmopolitanism, at the expense of the natural allegiance to Russia and all things Russian, but in my view, it shows a certain loss of objectivity, when reacting to the contemporary problems by blaming them on a historical precedent that may have indeed given rise to some negative phenomena in subsequent Russian life, but cannot be held responsible for them in isolation from its positive contribution to Russia’s enlightened future.
The great historian Klyuchevsky (1841-1911), considered by many the greatest, gives Peter a most curious, and actually quite subtle and intellectually stimulating characterization, which some critics see as a negative assessment, but I see it as a nuanced judgment, free from excessive praise, but hardly disparaging to Peter’s historical legacy:
“[Peter’s] reform emerged by itself from the vital needs of the state and the nation, instinctively perceived by an authoritarian man with a discerning mind and strong character and talents… The reform realized by Peter the Great was not directly designed to overhaul the political, social, or moral order established in this state, nor was it guided by the task of shifting the Russian life to the unaccustomed Western European foundations, of injecting it with some new borrowed basics, but was limited to the desire to arm the Russian state and its people with ready-made Western-European means, intellectual and material, and thus to bring the state up to the proper level with its achieved status in Europe… Started and conducted by the sovereign power, the customary leader of the people, it assumed the character and methods of a violent coup d’état, a revolution of some kind. It was a revolution not in terms of its objectives and results, but only in terms of its methods and the impressions it produced on the minds and nerves of its contemporaries.”
I am confident that this excellent characterization of Peter’s reform equally applies to Peter’s person as well and equally well characterizes the magnitude of his historical achievement from the objective perspective of a great historian, whose findings cannot be dismissed or contested, either by Peter’s greatest admirers or by his bitterest foes.
With Peter’s death in 1725 begins the so-called “age of women” on the Russian throne. In the 71 years, from 1725 to 1796, women-empresses reigned for the total of sixty-six years, leaving just five measly years in that stretch to men. For the record, all of the previous Russian rulers had been men, and, ever since the death of Catherine the Great, all the subsequent rulers of Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia were men as well, which makes the eighteenth century in Russian history all the more remarkable.
Of these women, four in all, Peter’s wife Catherine I was the first, and of all four, her case is certainly by far the most unusual. Her national and family origin has never been credibly established. Her officially credible name Ekaterina Alexeevna Mikhailova was assigned to her at baptism by the Russian Orthodox Church. As for the most familiar original name Martha Skavronskaya, it is considered spurious by several authoritative historians, while even those who casually call her by this name still recognize its contested authenticity. Her nationality is also difficult to establish. It is certain that the nickname “Shvedka,” Swede, is a generic, rather than specific, identification. (Likewise, “nemets” originally applied to all foreigners, and only later became associated with the German nationality per se.) There are historical allegations that she was of Latvian, or of Lithuanian, or even of Estonian stock, but the truth is probably never to be ascertained.
She was obviously very pretty as a girl, allegedly married at a very young age, but this fact again can be an understandable historical embellishment. What could never be embellished, however, was that during the Russo-Swedish Wars her beauty was discovered by a Russian army officer and "taken in" by him, after which she was discovered by that officer’s superior, and so on, until, finally, and luckily for her, she was discovered by Tsar Peter I, who was so much impressed with her that after several years of living together and having children together, he decided to marry her, and made her the Empress of Russia. At the time of Peter’s death in 1725 (she was at his side, as usual, holding his head in her arms) she became the court’s choice by default to become the next Russian monarch, an outrageous choice by all standards except one: everybody dreaded the alternative.
Catherine I reigned for a couple of years until her premature death at the age of forty-three. By all accounts, she was not a good ruler, spending her time partying, and delegating power to her more ambitious courtiers. Here is Sergei Solovyev’s summary opinion of her:
“With Peter she shone not with her own light but with the light borrowed from the great man whose partner she was; she had enough skill to hold herself up to a certain height, exhibit attentiveness and compassion toward the activity around her; she was privy to all secrets, the secrets of personal relationships of people around her; her status and fear of the future kept her mental and moral faculties in constant strong tension. But a clinging plant reaches a great height only thanks to that giant of the woods around which it had been creeping; the giant comes down and the weak creeper spreads down on the ground. Catherine retained her knowledge of persons and their interrelationships, retained her habit of weaving into these relationships; but she had no due attention to state affairs, especially domestic policies and their details, nor a capacity for initiative and direction.”
To summarize the whole thing, Peter the Great was the unquestionable ‘giant of the woods,’ and he deserves to be remembered as one of Russia’s greatest rulers ever, but at the time of death, like with many other great rulers, he was leaving his empire in demonstrably incapable hands, with the bad situation not getting much better even during the twenty-year reign of his fairly capable daughter Elizaveta Petrovna (1741-1761).
In fact it took the young German wife of the half-incompetent, half-demented virtual foreigner Peter III, to turn things around for Russia. It was “Catharina Secunda” (see my earlier entry Petrus Primus Et Catharina Secunda), and not “Catharina Prima,” or even Elizaveta Petrovna, or the other small fry, such as Anna Ioannovna and the accidental men, finding themselves on Peter’s large throne, to measure up to it, and to carry the name of Peter’s rightful successor.
First a few words about Peter in profuse addition to all those already said about him. Just like with Comrade Stalin, it is demonstrably uninstructive to seek an objective opinion of him among Peter’s contemporaries--- either among his apologists, or among his victims and detractors.
Among his foreign admirers in later times, Voltaire stands out not so much by the abundance of his praise as by the intellectual quality and authority of his assessment. His writings about Peter are voluminous. In 1759, he published the first volume, followed by the second volume in 1763, of his History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great, where he summarizes his historical assessment of Peter as follows (this isn’t a quote, but a mere paraphrase):
The greatest value of Peter’s reforms is that the progress that the Russians were able to achieve in 50 years could not have been achieved by other nations in 500 years.
Voltaire and Rousseau had a famous disagreement about Peter and his reforms, which obviously reinforces the importance of their subject as a high value subject.
Generally speaking, it is not at all surprising to find glowing assessments of Peter’s reign in historiographies, both East and West. Sergei Solovyev in that sense adds little intrigue to the debate about Peter’s legacy. It is all the more unusual that the great historian of pre-revolutionary Russia Nikolai Karamzin (1766- 1826) is unequivocally critical of the great Peter. He accuses him of an inordinate infatuation with things foreign, of his determination to turn Russia into a Netherlands. He complains that the radical change of the old way of Russian life was not always justified, and that as a result, Russia’s educated classes “became citizens of the world, but stopped being, in some cases, citizens of Russia.” Karamzin’s complaint is in fact understandable as an emerging nationalist reaction to the excesses of cosmopolitanism, at the expense of the natural allegiance to Russia and all things Russian, but in my view, it shows a certain loss of objectivity, when reacting to the contemporary problems by blaming them on a historical precedent that may have indeed given rise to some negative phenomena in subsequent Russian life, but cannot be held responsible for them in isolation from its positive contribution to Russia’s enlightened future.
The great historian Klyuchevsky (1841-1911), considered by many the greatest, gives Peter a most curious, and actually quite subtle and intellectually stimulating characterization, which some critics see as a negative assessment, but I see it as a nuanced judgment, free from excessive praise, but hardly disparaging to Peter’s historical legacy:
“[Peter’s] reform emerged by itself from the vital needs of the state and the nation, instinctively perceived by an authoritarian man with a discerning mind and strong character and talents… The reform realized by Peter the Great was not directly designed to overhaul the political, social, or moral order established in this state, nor was it guided by the task of shifting the Russian life to the unaccustomed Western European foundations, of injecting it with some new borrowed basics, but was limited to the desire to arm the Russian state and its people with ready-made Western-European means, intellectual and material, and thus to bring the state up to the proper level with its achieved status in Europe… Started and conducted by the sovereign power, the customary leader of the people, it assumed the character and methods of a violent coup d’état, a revolution of some kind. It was a revolution not in terms of its objectives and results, but only in terms of its methods and the impressions it produced on the minds and nerves of its contemporaries.”
I am confident that this excellent characterization of Peter’s reform equally applies to Peter’s person as well and equally well characterizes the magnitude of his historical achievement from the objective perspective of a great historian, whose findings cannot be dismissed or contested, either by Peter’s greatest admirers or by his bitterest foes.
With Peter’s death in 1725 begins the so-called “age of women” on the Russian throne. In the 71 years, from 1725 to 1796, women-empresses reigned for the total of sixty-six years, leaving just five measly years in that stretch to men. For the record, all of the previous Russian rulers had been men, and, ever since the death of Catherine the Great, all the subsequent rulers of Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia were men as well, which makes the eighteenth century in Russian history all the more remarkable.
Of these women, four in all, Peter’s wife Catherine I was the first, and of all four, her case is certainly by far the most unusual. Her national and family origin has never been credibly established. Her officially credible name Ekaterina Alexeevna Mikhailova was assigned to her at baptism by the Russian Orthodox Church. As for the most familiar original name Martha Skavronskaya, it is considered spurious by several authoritative historians, while even those who casually call her by this name still recognize its contested authenticity. Her nationality is also difficult to establish. It is certain that the nickname “Shvedka,” Swede, is a generic, rather than specific, identification. (Likewise, “nemets” originally applied to all foreigners, and only later became associated with the German nationality per se.) There are historical allegations that she was of Latvian, or of Lithuanian, or even of Estonian stock, but the truth is probably never to be ascertained.
She was obviously very pretty as a girl, allegedly married at a very young age, but this fact again can be an understandable historical embellishment. What could never be embellished, however, was that during the Russo-Swedish Wars her beauty was discovered by a Russian army officer and "taken in" by him, after which she was discovered by that officer’s superior, and so on, until, finally, and luckily for her, she was discovered by Tsar Peter I, who was so much impressed with her that after several years of living together and having children together, he decided to marry her, and made her the Empress of Russia. At the time of Peter’s death in 1725 (she was at his side, as usual, holding his head in her arms) she became the court’s choice by default to become the next Russian monarch, an outrageous choice by all standards except one: everybody dreaded the alternative.
Catherine I reigned for a couple of years until her premature death at the age of forty-three. By all accounts, she was not a good ruler, spending her time partying, and delegating power to her more ambitious courtiers. Here is Sergei Solovyev’s summary opinion of her:
“With Peter she shone not with her own light but with the light borrowed from the great man whose partner she was; she had enough skill to hold herself up to a certain height, exhibit attentiveness and compassion toward the activity around her; she was privy to all secrets, the secrets of personal relationships of people around her; her status and fear of the future kept her mental and moral faculties in constant strong tension. But a clinging plant reaches a great height only thanks to that giant of the woods around which it had been creeping; the giant comes down and the weak creeper spreads down on the ground. Catherine retained her knowledge of persons and their interrelationships, retained her habit of weaving into these relationships; but she had no due attention to state affairs, especially domestic policies and their details, nor a capacity for initiative and direction.”
To summarize the whole thing, Peter the Great was the unquestionable ‘giant of the woods,’ and he deserves to be remembered as one of Russia’s greatest rulers ever, but at the time of death, like with many other great rulers, he was leaving his empire in demonstrably incapable hands, with the bad situation not getting much better even during the twenty-year reign of his fairly capable daughter Elizaveta Petrovna (1741-1761).
In fact it took the young German wife of the half-incompetent, half-demented virtual foreigner Peter III, to turn things around for Russia. It was “Catharina Secunda” (see my earlier entry Petrus Primus Et Catharina Secunda), and not “Catharina Prima,” or even Elizaveta Petrovna, or the other small fry, such as Anna Ioannovna and the accidental men, finding themselves on Peter’s large throne, to measure up to it, and to carry the name of Peter’s rightful successor.
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