IT ALL SEEMS so familiar. Whenever the West expresses optimism about the advent of a Europeanized Russian “liberal” as the head of state, there’s a good chance reference will be made to Peter the Great, the man credited with dragging Russia out of the dark ages and founding the pre-Soviet empire. An entire history of social and political thought used to rest upon this czar who whose very name was a synecdoche for Russian glory (Stalin’s famous worship of Ivan the Terrible notwithstanding).
Peter founded the city that bears his name as a “window into Europe,” created the country’s first standing army and navy for purposes of warring with Sweden, and converted the pedigreed nobility, or mestnichestvo, into a bureaucratic military class with an open enrollment policy. For this, he became an icon of promise and reform to the 19th century intelligentsia, which tended to downplay his more dubious accomplishments, like merging slavery and serfdom in order to expand the Russian tax base, establishing the internal passport system, one of Lenin’s main grievances with the ancien regime (before the Soviet one restored it), consolidating a hyper-loyalist cadre of czarist nomenklatura known as “Peter’s Fledglings,” nationalizing the incipient state industry, bringing the Orthodox Church under his all-commanding sway, overseeing a 25 percent drop in the population during his 44 year reign, and, most perilously of all, enacting the Law of Succession. This abolished primogeniture in the dynasty and gave the sitting czar complete freedom to choose his heir. Court intrigue and assassinations were the result of this disastrous policy, which not a few historians have seen as the first domino to fall before the revolution 200 years later.
