In 1697, having been Czar of Russia for fifteen years and having reached the ripe age of 25, Peter decided to go west, in disguise. Together with a handpicked delegation of Russian merchants, officials, and intelligentsia, Peter visited Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and England to learn how most expeditiously to improve Russia, and his own capacity to rule. He and the other Russians studied European military techniques, shipbuilding methods, and several other important crafts. Most of all, they sought to understand how the West operated, how Europeans lived, and what Russians could do to become more like Europeans.
Peter was Russia’s premier modernizer. Vladimir is an evil revanchist, seeking to recreate an empire that collapsed before he could rule it. Peter was no gentle autocrat, crushing opponents, putting down a palace guard revolt, and forcing nobles hew a strict line of obedience. But he understood Russia’s weaknesses well and tried, as he strengthened his state’s might and place in the world, relentlessly making its inner workings more enlightened, more secular, more industrial, and more reliant on learning.
Peter founded schools at home and sent children from the noble classes to be educated in Europe, the better to become inculcated with European ideas and manners. He emancipated women, compelled men to shave (the Orthodox Church had preferred long beards) and to shorten their customary long coats. Possibly most critically of all, Peter preferred talent to toadyism. He filled high administrative offices and military ranks by merit, not according to family origins or by being bribed. Peter established the Russian Academy of Sciences, mimicking what he had experienced on his western travels. He also employed a phalanx of Europeans to guide Russia’s modernizing efforts.
Peter also laid the foundations of Russian industrial prosperity. Mining copper and iron in the Ural Mountains began with Peter. He constructed important roads and canals, and later ports. Merchants of all kinds found him responsive to their needs for new infrastructure, for reformed methods of involvement by the bureaucracy of the czarist state, and for new methods of doing business and of expanding trade with the rest of the known world. Vladimir the Puny does the opposite, seemingly intent to drive today’s Russia back to a yesteryear.
Vladimir the Puny sees the founding by Peter of his patronymic city, St. Petersburg -- where Vladimir spent his youth and became deputy mayor -- as a sign of imperial expansion onto lands once controlled by other powers. But Peter conceived of the city as a window on the West – as an opening to the kinds of Western values that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russia required to grow and to modernize. What Peter wanted so much, and fought major battles to achieve, Vladimir, centuries later, disdains.
Peter was an impatient builder, a ruler desirous of embracing the West and of pursuing reforms that were intended to benefit his people. Vladimir rejects the West, invading Ukraine to close Russia off from improving influences, from ideas more enlightened, more progressive, and more eleemosynary than those he learned in Soviet times. Vladimir is no Peter, despite his strident claims this past week that he, alone of Russians, was heir to the greatness of Peter. As Sen. Lloyd Bentsen told Sen. Dan Quayle in a vice-presidential campaign debate in 1988, “You’re no Jack Kennedy,” so someone like Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky needs to tell Vladimir the Puny that he is definitively no Peter the Great.
Putin on Thursday declared that he was Peter reincarnated because he was (trying) to restore Russia to its Soviet greatness. That is what invading Ukraine and taking back lands that were rightfully Russia’s was all about. Putin said that Peter had fought Sweden for twenty-one years to re-gain czarist lands. “It is our lot to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country],” said Putin. Indeed, Putin reiterated that his was a war for geopolitical dominance, admitting to a shameless “land grab.”
Putin’s history is false. Before Peter’s day, Sweden was a world power and had long before it battled czarist Russia conquered much of the peoples who now comprise the Baltic nations, much of Poland, and most of what is now Belarus. Peter was determined in his modernizing drive to give Russia ports on the Baltic Sea, as well as openings for expansion into Siberia, and to the Black and Caspian Seas. Peter conquered new terrain, not lands long lost. And St. Petersburg was constructed on swampy land liberated from Finland and Sweden during the interminable wars of the eighteenth century. Nothing substantial was there before.
Putin routinely asserts that Ukraine never existed as a people and a nation before the other Vladimir – Vladimir Lenin – mistakenly “created” Ukraine on Russian territory. As we pointed out at length earlier, this is nonsense as well. (# 13, “The Real Ukraine,” March 22; #53 – “The Cossacks, Earlier Staunch Defenders of Ukraine,” May 19). Ukrainians as a people and as language date back to the tenth century. Until World War II, Russia and the Soviet Union ruled only the eastern half of modern Ukraine, taking the area west of the Dnieper River from Poland.
Not only is Putin no Peter, he cannot hold even a small candle up to Peter. The latter uttered few big lies, kept his promises, had benevolent instincts, and (for the era) was one of the world’s most profound progressives. Vladimir the Puny is small czar looking for bigger men to impress. It is past time that his ambitions were thwarted by Ukraine, and by the concerted efforts of the West. Then, perhaps, Russia could again come in from the cold. Peter the Great would wish that it could and would.
This is the age-old debate between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers, which played out so tragically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Russia. We see similar dynamics in many other countries, where blowback against globalization clashes with neoliberal proponents. The result of this tug-of-war, then and now, is see-saw policy making rather than continuous progress.