The Difference that Peter I Made

Ernest A. Zitser

ABSTRACT

Arguing that the modernity, rationality and secularity of Peter the Great’s project have

been generally over-emphasized, this chapter contends that the tsar’s drive to transform

his vast realm into a wealthy, powerful, and well-regulated empire derived less from his

fondness for things foreign or from the constant demands of warfare than from his sense

of divine election for his imperial vocation and his unswerving belief—nurtured by his

intimates, tested by the ups-and-downs of political and military fortune, and re-presented

by ceremonies and spectacles, both sacred and profane—that he was predestined for

greatness.

KEYWORDS

Westernization, modernization, secularization, Court ceremony, charisma,

transfiguration, warfare

‘The life of Peter [the Great] is the Russian Gospel.’ S. P. Shevyrev, Diary (1830) 1

In 1991, on the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Evgenii Anisimov, arguably

the pre-eminent Petrine scholar of our time, summarized his research into what he saw as

the long-lasting and largely deleterious social, political, and economic consequences of

the reforms of Emperor Peter I, ‘The Great’ (1672-1725). 2 Subtitled ‘Birth of an Empire’,

Zitser, p. 1
his article attempted to chart the precise moment when the statist imperative for ‘progress

through coercion’ made its first appearance on the horizon of modern Russian history.

The leitmotiv of Anisimov’s article was the analogy between Petrine Russia and one of

those top-of-the-line sailing vessels that was the technological marvel of Peter’s age, and

whose forced introduction was one of the hallmarks of his reign. In the hands of a

distinguished historian, however, this elaborate figure of speech became more than just

decorative. The maritime analogy allowed Anisimov to expound his views about the

skipper (Peter), passengers (nobility, merchantry, peasantry), and Utopian destination of

the Russian ship-of-state (the rational, well-ordered kingdom of enlightened political

theorists), while reiterating the main theme of his popular biography of Peter, which

famously compared that tsar’s naval program to the Soviet Union’s costly, ideologically-

driven initiative to keep up with the space programme of the capitalist West. 3 A

deliberate reliance on his contemporaries’ knowledge of a literary commonplace thus

enabled Anisimov both to cite and subtly subvert Alexander Pushkin’s famous poetic

description of ‘the glorious skipper under whom our land moved forward, who mightily

added sovereign speed to the helm of our native ship’. 4

Anisimov’s masterful evocation of the maritime imagery popularly associated

with the reign of Russia’s first emperor offers not only a fine example of late Soviet

historical writing, but also a demonstration of the kind of narrative devices that have

traditionally been used to describe the difference that Peter made and, in fact, still

continues to make. However, as is the case with a number of other conceptual metaphors

employed in his work, 5 Anisimov’s revisionist ‘take’ on the nautical analogy led him to

over-emphasize the modernity, rationality, and secularity of Peter’s project. The heuristic

Zitser, p. 2
value of these concepts has recently come to be questioned by a new generation of

scholars, who personally witnessed the collapse of both structuralist and Cold War

binaries and produced a body of research that suggests another way of reading the

historical evidence, as well as what we mean by ‘history’ and ‘evidence’ in the first

place. 6 Following their lead, this chapter will be much more wary of applying terms like

‘Westernization’, ‘modernization’, or ‘secularization’ to late-seventeenth and early

eighteenth century Russia. Instead, it will seek to locate the analogy between Peter’s

Russia and a ship-of-the-line within the discursive practices of the post-Schism

generation of the Muscovite Court elite, where any contextualized study of the reign must

be situated. As we will see, when the available sources are analyzed from this particular

perspective, the Petrine ship-of-state appears less as a prototypical example of totalitarian

propaganda than as a Baroque political allegory, much like the one that graced the

frontispiece of the Naval Statute of 1720.[FIGURE 1]

Even if most Muscovites did not understand all the allusions, the individuals who

commissioned, executed, or viewed the frontispiece to the Petrine Naval Statute

understood that such allegorical images employed the recondite language of emblems to

figure the ineffable. 7 Those members of the late Muscovite elite who were unable to read

the didactic rhyme at the bottom of this engraving could still see that its depiction of a

youth in a rudderless sailboat, guided by a winged personification of Time under the

ever-watchful, all-seeing eye of Divine Providence, was intended to make a statement

about the charismatic nature of royal authority, and not just to serve as florid window

dressing to the hard-nosed, practical, imperial projects that guided Peter’s domestic and

foreign policies, and that were embodied in the naval rule-book itself. To even posit the

Zitser, p. 3
question of whether the Petrine project was about Cameralism or charisma would be akin

to asking whether the Apostle Peter was a saint or merely the fisherman Simon-Cephas,

who was called to serve as the Rock of the one, true Church. For those who believed in

the divine nature of Jesus, and the God-ordained mission of his anointed representatives

on earth, as did Tsar Peter Alekseevich and his contemporaries at the late Muscovite

Court, what was more important was the fact that the tsar’s patron saint could appear to

be both, at one and the same time, embodying in his very person the transfiguration of the

world heralded by the coming of the messiah.

The breath-taking audacity of this politically-motivated interpretation of biblical

imagery paled in comparison to the sentiment expressed in a 1718 engraving [FIGURE

2], which depicted Jesus Christ himself walking on the waves towards a tiny fishing boat

holding the apostles, who float to one side of a Russian imperial man-of-war in full sail.

That particular engraving served as an illustration for a laudatory poem from a book of

contemporary Nautical Scenes, which drew a parallel between the story in the Gospel of

Matthew (Matthew 14:24-33) and the providential and redemptive mission of Peter’s

navy. The 1718 engraving, in its turn, seemed to recall the words of the White Sea monk

who twenty-two years earlier had compared the ‘miraculous’ rescue (from a near-

shipwreck) of the St. Peter, the foreign-made royal yacht commissioned by the tsar and

named after his heavenly namesake, to the apostles’ test of faith in the divinity of Jesus.

At the time, the tsar and his retinue had capitalized on this interpretation by staging a

procession with a mast-shaped cross, which was carved, inscribed by, and carried on the

shoulders of ‘Captain Piter’ himself. By taking part in this impromptu Court ceremony,

Peter and his mock ‘apostles’ celebrated not only their own physical survival, or the

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political salvation that the tsar’s as yet non-existent imperial navy supposedly augured for

land-his locked realm, but also the fact that the Christ-like carpenter-tsar, like his

heavenly namesakes, could also walk on water. 8

What all these examples of the contemporary use of nautical imagery reveal is

that in Petrine Court culture there really was no difference between the messianic persona

of the Davidic King and that of the practical Cameralist Prince. Both constituted

interlocking parts of the self-presentation of this late Muscovite tsar, a deliberate mixing

of secular and religious imagery that was in general characteristic of Baroque

representation. Peter’s repeated efforts to prove his God-given gift of grace points to the

fact that personal charisma—in the original, religious sense of the word—remained the

primary source of political legitimacy in this period of divine right monarchy, especially

in Muscovite Court culture, and especially in the militarized retinue of this peripatetic

warrior-tsar. Indeed, without downplaying the importance of the examples provided by

other contemporary Christian rulers or the challenges and opportunities offered by

domestic politics and dynastic geopolitics, it is fair to say that Peter’s drive to transform

his vast realm into a wealthy, powerful, and well-regulated empire derived less from his

fondness for things foreign or from the constant demands of war-making than from his

sense of divine election for his imperial vocation and his unswerving belief—nurtured by

his intimates and boon-companions, tested by the ups-and-downs of political and military

fortune, and re-presented by ceremonies and spectacles, both sacred and profane—that he

was predestined for greatness.

Of course, nothing about Peter’s success was preordained, and everything from

his coronation to his battles could have just as easily turned out differently. For example,

Zitser, p. 5
the fact that the sole male offspring from the second marriage of Tsar Aleksei

Mikhailovich (1629-1676, r. 1645-76)—at the time, the youngest royal in the Romanov

dynasty, and therefore, according to Muscovite inheritance practices and court custom,

the one with the weakest rights to the royal succession of all of Alexei’s male heirs—was

in no way guaranteed to inherit the throne of his father, much less acquire the titles of

‘Emperor’ and ‘Father of the Fatherland’, which he was formally to assume in 1721.

Biological chance and determined political action on the part of his maternal relatives and

their allies, as well bad luck on the field of battle and the marriage bed on the part of his

faction’s political enemies, laid the groundwork for Peter’s accession to the throne and

the origins of his independent rule in 1689. Similarly, as Paul Bushkovitch has

emphasized, in the volatile geopolitical context of the early eighteenth century, when

even the best-laid plans had a tendency to go awry and a single, risky, tactical decision

could result in the capture of an entire army, the forfeiture of all diplomatic and territorial

gains, and the failure of all lofty projects, even Peter’s much-vaunted success on the field

of battle was much more contingent than is commonly recognized. 9 The worst-case

scenario outlined above is something that could have happened to Peter after the defeat at

Narva, at the very start of the so-called Great Northern War (1700-1721), had Charles XII

decided to move his victorious Swedish army against Muscovy instead of its other allies

in the northern coalition. It is precisely what Peter experienced on a much smaller scale

during his brief and disastrous campaign against the Ottomans in 1711, when, in

exchange for his own life, he had to surrender all the territories captured during the

previous decade, including the southern port-city, Azov, and naval fleet that he had spent

huge sums and countless man-hours constructing. And it is exactly what happened to

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Charles XII himself during the famous battle of Poltava (28-29 June 1709), which

marked the end of Swedish, and the start of Russian hegemony in the Baltic region.

That Peter was fortunate enough to survive in this unstable geopolitical

environment, as he had earlier in the no-less difficult domestic one, is a testament to the

fact that he was prepared for the opportunities when they came. He always seemed to be

able to mobilize the men and means at his disposal in order to ride out the bad times, and

even to take risks and make those opportunities happen, as he did most clearly after the

diplomatic failure of the so-called Grand Embassy of 1697-8, 10 when the tsar and his

advisors made the fateful decision to go to war against Sweden in the first place. As the

example of the resulting, unexpectedly protracted military conflict suggests, and as

Anisimov has convincingly argued, Peter’s actions and risk-taking behaviour nearly

always had unintended consequences, most of them negative, especially for the majority

of the non-elite urban and rural population, which bore, side-stepped, or fled the burdens

of his government’s war-time extractions and its frequently ineffectual but increasingly

insistent intrusion into their daily lives—a Cameralist paternalism explicated in royal

decrees, church sermons, and official spectacles, and justified on the grounds of the

‘common good’.

The means used and the consequences resulting from Peter’s risk-taking

behaviour frequently undermined the lofty aims and ideals that guided it, and made his

avowed and publicly-trumpeted intention to transform his poor but extensive realm into a

sea-faring kingdom of prosperous, polite subjects largely a sham for all but the smallest

number of his people. Most of these individuals, not surprisingly, had close family ties

to, or intimate dealings with the tsar’s favourites and other high-placed courtiers, and

Zitser, p. 7
many of them were part of the particular constellation of Muscovite political clans that

happened to have the tsar’s ear and controlled appointments and policy-making both in

the capital and the provinces. But, as with the Enlightenment of Catherine II, or the

socialism of the Bolsheviks, it would be wrong to dismiss the ideals that guided Peter’s

policies as mere camouflage for royal hubris, geopolitical necessity, or class-based

exploitation. Peter’s ideals, the values that informed them, and the means through which

they were enacted— whether triumphal processions, legislative acts, spectacular mass-

executions, or blasphemous parodies of church rituals—were just as important for his

success as his indomitable will, his ability to take counsel, to learn from mistakes, and to

lead the motley ‘company’ that he gathered around him and that he alternatively bullied

and awed to ensure that they continued to support him regardless of what things may

come.

The desire to engage in war and, later, the demands of early modern warfare itself

were certainly among the most crucial impulses driving Peter to broach the possibility of

change, and then to seek to institutionalize the changes that he made. However, when

speaking about the undeniable importance of warfare for the history of Peter’s reign, it is

important to remember that the desire for military success and the wealth and fame that

came with it, as well as the skills and high-tech weaponry that made it possible, preceded

Peter’s Grand Embassy to northwestern Europe, and were not merely a product of

Russia’s supposed ‘westernization’. This analytically fuzzy term for the external

influences that inevitably made Russia modern, and of which Peter supposedly served as

an historical avatar, is much too Eurocentric and teleological to describe the actual role

that Muscovy played during the cycle of early modern globalization that followed the so-

Zitser, p. 8
called Age of Explorations. 11 In order to make sense of Petrine ‘westernization’, it is not

enough to note exactly which of the many West(s) Peter decided to visit and which

foreign experts he chose to hire to lead his armies; found new industrial enterprises; teach

at his newly-instituted schools of mathematics, navigation, and medicine; and supervise

construction at harbors, dock-yards, and palatial residences. If we instead start the

narrative before Peter’s departure abroad, so that it encompasses the ‘war games’

immediately preceding the Azov campaigns of 1695-6, and then take the story past the

celebration of the end of the Northern War in 1721, so that Peter’s Persian campaigns

(1722-3) are set in the larger context of Russia’s imperial grand strategy, then we will

notice that the last tsar of Muscovy did not see his realm as a piece of wax awaiting the

stamp of the ‘West’, as the famous and oft-quoted motto on Peter’s personal ring-seal

would suggest. [FIGURE 3]

Although the motto (‘I am a student and seek those who can teach me’) has

frequently been interpreted as evidence of Peter’s supposed long-cherished desire to open

a ‘window onto Europe’, the context in which it was first used suggests otherwise. In

reality, as V. Iu. Matveev has noted, 12 this seal was commissioned some time before

Peter’s decision to embark on his tour of Europe, and first graced the letters that the tsar

sent while overseeing the siege of a Turkish fortress on the Azov Sea, the site of his first

naval-military operations against the Ottoman Empire and of the first (if ultimately

unsuccessful) attempt to build an imperial Russian navy and a new capital- and port-

city. 13 The timing for the creation of this seal reminds us not only that the tsar’s

commitment to his divinely-inspired vocation antedated his self-appointed apprenticeship

to British and Dutch ship-builders, but also provides evidence for the argument that

Zitser, p. 9
Peter’s efforts to acquire the tools and to recruit the master-craftsmen who could teach his

subjects the tricks of the trade of empire-building were intended to transform Muscovy

not into an European colonial power, but a transcontinental, Eurasian one: a reinvigorated

Orthodox realm that could effectively project its power on both land and sea, engage the

Ottoman fleet, take over the lucrative trade routes between Orient and Occident, and

redirect them through Muscovite territory. In other words, to complete the ambitious

project of imperial reform that had already been broached during the reign of Peter’s own

father. 14

It is precisely because of the Eurocentric interpretation that makes the ‘West’ the

focal point of Peter’s activities that the flurry of legislation that followed immediately

upon the Grand Embassy’s return to Moscow in 1698 is still attributed primarily to the

tsar’s experiences during his first trip abroad. This interpretation, however, puts the cart

before the horse, since the Grand Embassy was in fact the result of Peter’s interest in

imperial reform, not the cause. The issue here is not so much the effect of his

experiences during the Grand Embassy, but of the coexistence and indissolubility of

spiritual-charismatic and practical goals. The entourage of the Russian tsar had

expressed its desire for ‘good order’ (Polizey, to give the German term) and military

glory—and the accoutrements, sartorial and pogonic, 15 that the fulfillment of such a

desire seemed to entail—long before Peter set foot outside the country or issued his first

piece of Cameralist-inspired legislation. That fact that they did so initially during the

spectacular war games, fireworks displays, and sacred parodies enacted on the suburban

royal estate with the speaking name of Novo-Preobrazhenskoe (‘New Transfiguration’),

rather than in the kind of legislative acts that would serve as the primary sources for

Zitser, p. 10
nineteenth-century Russian historians of the ‘State School’, partly explains why the

political significance of ephemeral court ceremonies has been overlooked and

marginalized in the historiography of Peter’s reign. But the fact that the tsar and his

entourage expressed a desire for change at all reflected the upbringing characteristic of a

new generation of the seventeenth-century Muscovite elite, one that was raised in and

sought to take advantage of an unstable domestic and geopolitical environment in an

increasingly-interconnected world economy.

Recent research into the worldview of the late Muscovite ruling elite and the

‘fledglings of Peter’s nest’— a term that Pushkin famously used to refer to the tsar’s

most-ardent supporters 16—has confirmed that Russian courtiers and hereditary servitors

were not unaware of the benefits of the military, economic, and scientific innovations that

made their geopolitical and confessional rivals so powerful and their realms so wealthy in

comparison to Muscovy. 17 Their response to these developments, and to the intellectual

challenge posed by the ideas of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the so-

called Scientific and Military Revolutions, however, was dictated by radically different

social and cultural contexts than those found, say, in Amsterdam, Warsaw, or

Constantinople. And, not surprisingly, it produced very different results, the most

obvious of which was the profitable extension of serfdom to ever larger parts of the

Russian realm at a time when this particular form of human bondage (unlike chattel-

slavery) was disappearing in the rest of the Christian world. Yet for all these differences,

the choices made by the Russian elite under Peter and his predecessors, in both the

domestic and geopolitical spheres, contributed and helped to re-define the contours of

early modern ‘Europe’ as we know it; just as the myth of Peter would later inform the

Zitser, p. 11
philosophes’ definitions of ‘enlightened absolutism’, and, thereby of the Enlightenment

project itself. So if we wish to stick with the older terminology, we must say that in

addition to being ‘westernized’, Muscovy contributed its share to the ‘westernization’ of

the early modern world. 18

What distinguished Petrine ‘westernization’ from that of his father was not the

tsar’s genuine (and well-advertised) xenophilia, but his government’s massive and

generally confession-blind effort to recruit personnel who were able to apply the latest

technologies of colonial administration both within and without his realm. As his so-

called childhood amusements demonstrated, at an early age Peter and his advisors were

intent on mobilizing a socially- and confessionally-variegated royalist party—one

composed of hereditary Muscovite servitors, foreign technical experts, and even low-born

favourites—that is, basically anyone who was eager to follow Peter wherever he led and

to use all available means at their disposal to seek his favour and carry out his will. And

it was a given that this will was going to be put in the service of the traditional job

description of an early modern monarch—namely war-fighting and the expansion of his

realm and its wealth 19—not merely to satiate Peter’s unfeigned passion for the wine,

women, and fashions of his table companions from Moscow’s Foreign Quarter, the

section of the capital that housed the growing confessionally- and ethnically-heterodox

community of merchants and mercenaries employed in the seventeenth-century by

successive Muscovite administrations.

In fact, the openness and ecumenicism that was so crucial to the success of Peter’s

project had less to do with any endorsement of meritocratic principles—such as those

supposedly enshrined in the famous Table of Ranks of 1722—than with the self-

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conscious and deliberate disavowal of his predecessors’ policy of restricting access to the

sacrosanct body of the Russian Orthodox tsar. This more open policy of access allowed

Peter to recruit the best and most knowledgeable royal advisers that money could buy,

regardless of whether they were natives or foreigners, Orthodox or heterodox, while still

maintaining the illusion—the word that literally means keeping ‘in play’—of being

Russia’s Anointed One. The fact that some of the foreigners who aided and abetted the

staging of the tsar’s charismatic scenario of power may also have believed in the crucial

role that Providence had assigned the Muscovite tsar in the coming ‘Great Instauration’

—the long-hoped-for re-unification of Christianity supposedly made possible by new

advances in scientific knowledge 20—only made Peter’s job that much easier, especially

since he had already come to believe (and to have encouraged his intimates to believe) in

his special election for the divinely-appointed task of transfiguring his realm.

Peter’s foreign advisors were not simply conduits of ‘Western’ ideas to the

Russian court. They were hired not because of their place of origin, but because of their

knowledge and specific skill sets, which had only a tangential relationship to where these

individuals actually came from, since these skills and this knowledge were deemed to be

universal and easily transferable. In order not to fall back on a reified dichotomy

between a modern ‘West’ and a backward ‘East’, we need to recall Gottfried Wilhelm

Leibniz’s (1646-1716) argumentation about the real possibility of transplanting the useful

arts and sciences to Muscovite Russia, as well as his unexpected (to our eyes) religious

and esoteric motives for urging Peter to do so. 21 The biblically-inspired agricultural

metaphors employed by Leibniz in his correspondence with Peter demonstrate that the

greatest philosopher of the age, like many of his contemporaries, believed that although

Zitser, p. 13
the ‘cultivation’ of the arts and sciences originated (or, more precisely, reached its true

flowering, after the renaissance of classical knowledge) in Christian Europe, this

knowledge was not confined to European civilization. It could, and in fact, had to be

exported like a precious plant that, with industry, time, and God’s help could be made to

grow even in the supposedly inhospitable intellectual climates of heterodox (Muscovy)

and pagan (China) realms. This act of transplantation had to occur in order to bring about

the unification of mankind and the instauration of true knowledge of the divine plan.

That is one reason why Leibniz was so solicitous of Peter the Great and why Protestant

missionaries were so keen on serving in Russia in the first place. Indeed, it is fair to say

that for some of the foreign merchants and military-men who flocked to his court at the

end of the seventeenth- and beginning of the eighteenth-century, the attraction of service

to Peter was motivated less by a desire to make a fortune than the intent to use the young

Muscovite tsar to further their own political or religious ends at home and abroad, as was

clearly the case with Scottish Jacobites and German Pietists.22

Whether or not Peter and his courtiers really shared their advisers’ notions of

translatio studii, 23 the Russians were very glad to take advantage of their knowledge and

their skills to advance Muscovite interests domestically and internationally. The reasons

for this eagerness on the part of the tsar are manifold, but not difficult to fathom. They

can be understood not only in the light of the Romanovs’ imperial aims and expansionist

foreign policy, which required experts in everything from ship-building and map-making

to metallurgy and medicine, but also in Peter’s efforts to present himself as a civilized

Christian monarch – that is, not just as a successful ‘Soldier King’ abroad, but also as a

patron of the arts and sciences at home. Such a stance encouraged the tsar to emulate

Zitser, p. 14
other founders of royal scientific academies and partly explains his eagerness to seek

Leibniz’s advice in the first place. As this example suggests, the tsar’s enthusiasm

stemmed neither from a blind admiration of the supposedly inherent superiority of ‘the

West’ nor from a ‘systemic crisis’ of Muscovite ‘traditionalism’, but rather, from a

calculated assessment of the kinds of things that would make the Russian tsar as rich and

powerful as his neighbouring Christian monarchs, as well as from a new-found

willingness to take those foreign monarchs as explicit examples and paragons for the

policies of an Orthodox tsar.

But regardless of Peter’s charisma, or the motivations, special skills, and diligence

of his foreign favorites, the tsar’s policies would never have succeeded if he did not have

the support and encouragement of the old Muscovite political clans, many of whom had

been in royal service since before the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. In turn,

the hereditary service elite’s sometimes grudging openness to the outlandish ideas,

strange customs, and incomprehensible native languages of the tsar’s new advisers

resulted as much from the long-term cultural changes that followed in the wake of the

Russian Church Schism of 1666-7 as from the courtiers’ desire to please the tsar and

placate his favourites in return for concrete material benefits, social status, and political

power. A description of the precise shape that the pan-European processes of

‘confessionalization’ and ‘social disciplining’ took in the Russian context still awaits its

historian. 24 What is certain, however, even at this point, is that the innovations

introduced during the course of Peter’s reign were prepared by at least three decades of

changes in the outlook of the post-Schism Muscovite elite and enacted by a generation of

newly-educated, self-conscious individuals acting from within the establishment,

Zitser, p. 15
sometimes against the very institutions of the establishment itself. Thus, if we are ever to

understand the social bases of support for Peter’s policies and his successful enactment of

a charismatic scenario of power, we must pay more attention to the processes—social,

ideational, and institutional—that created hereditary servitors willing and able to take on

the burdens of faith in a divinely-anointed warrior-tsar and to follow him wherever he

may lead: be it into battle (territory familiar to the Muscovite service elite), or into the

uncharted waters of naval and civil service at home or abroad (a plunge into unknown

territory that required both the use of incentives and the selective application of coercive

measures). Doing so would not only help us to re-write the political and intellectual

history of late Muscovite Russia, but also allow us to re-formulate the terms of the debate

about the nature of the Petrine project and the impact of Peter himself.

Putting aside the fact that both ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’, in the sense in which

they are conventionally used, are anachronisms that would have very little meaning for

actors in late-seventeenth and early eighteenth century Russia, 25 it is obvious that the

endless historiographical quarrel between those who consider Peter a revolutionary deus

ex machina and those who stress the continuities apparent in all his actions has the same

sort of circularity as the argument between the pessimist and the optimist about whether

the glass is half-empty or half-full. The point, of course, is not that Peter merely poured

‘new wine into old bottles’—the truism to which most historians resort in order to square

the circle between reform/revolution and continuity/change during the reign of Peter the

Great 26—but, rather, the ease with which we have come to rely on such clichés to

describe the difference that he made. Could it be the case, as Olga Kosheleva has argued,

that the very same conceptual categories that now provide the basis for the historical

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paradigms that we habitually use to explicate the tack taken by the Petrine ship-of-state

actually preclude the possibility of imagining alternative interpretations of the evidence?

What do we do when the ‘metaphors we live by’ have brought us to a historiographical

dead-end? Is further study of the Petrine reforms even possible? 27

Instead of abandoning the enterprise altogether, it is important to realize that both

the ‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionary’ interpretations of Peter’s reign capture important

aspects of the phenomenon under study. What is needed is an explanation that combines

aspects of both theses into a new interpretive synthesis, which transcends the traditional

divide and explains the possibility for both continuity and discontinuity within the

historical process. As the work of Iu. M. Lotman, B. A. Uspenskii, and V. M. Zhivov

suggests, a semiotically-informed historical analysis of discursive practices (of both the

Petrine and later eras of Russian history) must play an important (though not the sole or

even primary) role in this explanation. 28 Since I cannot provide such an explanation in

the space allotted, I would like to take this opportunity to propose yet another analogy—

forced though it may at first sound—through which we can understand the difference that

Peter made. I suggest that in order to transcend the perennial debate between the

pessimist and the optimist, we need to remind ourselves of the specific context in which

the notion of new wine in old bottles arose, if only to recapture some of the explosive

meaning originally conveyed by these now largely empty words. What exactly is the

vessel in question, and what is actually in it?

As anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the New Testament knows, the

parable of the new wine and the old bottles—or, to be more precise, old wineskins—

derives its explosive power from the eschatological context in which it is first invoked

Zitser, p. 17
(Matthew 9:17; Mark 2:21-22). The writers of the gospels, and other members of the

movement seeking to institutionalize their interpretation of Jesus’ message, employed the

parable of the wineskins to convey a truth (to those willing to receive it) about the

transformative experience of conversion to the strange new faith that would later be

called Christianity. Regardless of whether one is pagan or Jew, man or woman, master or

slave, to accept Jesus and his message, to receive the new reality of the kingdom of God,

one has to be born again in the spirit. Consequently, it is not the novelty of the wine or

the antiquity of the bottles, but what happens in the mystical process of transfer between

the two that really matters under the new dispensation. For in the context of the

Eucharist, the sacrament whose ritual performance simultaneously transforms the host

into the very blood of Christ and those who partake of it into a community of believers in

the divinity of the anointed and crucified messiah, the new wine serves to affirm nothing

less than the central mystery of the faith.

Strange and blasphemous as it may sound, and as it certainly did sound to many

of his Muscovite contemporaries, members of the movement seeking to institutionalize

what I have only half-jokingly referred to as the ‘New Gospel According to Peter’ made a

parallel case for their own very different message about the coming transfiguration of the

world. They did so, as I have argued elsewhere, not so much by direct comparisons

between the tsar and God—although there are notable examples of even such blunt

political allegories—but by staging and participating in spectacular, and frequently

obscene demonstrations of royal charisma. 29 The organizers of these strange (and

deliberately estranging) antinomian ceremonies sought to present themselves as an

apostolic brotherhood of true believers in the coming of a new political dispensation and

Zitser, p. 18
to depict the tsar as Russia’s own Anointed One, who could turn the world upside down,

if necessary, in order to reconstitute it anew. As they themselves defined it, this was a

struggle of biblical proportions, one that pitted the (self-) righteous, divinely-chosen

ruling elite and its Davidic leader not only against foreign ‘infidels’ (who could be

Muslim Crimean Tatars, Ukrainian Cossacks, or Lutheran Swedes, depending on the

needs of the moment), 30 but also against the stiff-necked chosen people—the “imperial

Russians” (rossiiane)—whom they were charged by God Himself with leading towards

the good life.

Obviously, the Petrine interpretation of the spirit of Muscovite political theology

did not immediately coalesce into a coherent and unassailable dogma. Neither did it go

completely unchallenged. The regime’s simultaneous indebtedness to and subversion of

the Muscovite tradition of royal sacralization certainly did not make the tsar’s policies

any more palatable to his Orthodox subjects. This was especially true for those subjects

who refused to accept the very real burdens of faith that came with the new imperial cult,

and who saw Peter as a blaspheming usurper of God’s Word, if not as anti-Christ himself.

Nor could it possibly satisfy those inhabitants of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional

imperial realm who did not share the worldview of their Russian Orthodox neighbors,

and yet who were nevertheless forced to deal with it simply because Russian colonizers

and officials had brought the territories that they occupied into Muscovy’s expanding

sphere of influence. On the ground, it was not at all clear how (or even if) the stand-off

between the activist government of Peter the Great and its subjects would actually result

in the redefinition of social and cultural hierarchies. And there is certainly no evidence to

support the contention that this confrontation was destined to create an unbridgeable rift

Zitser, p. 19
between the life of the ‘modern Westernized nobleman’ and that of the ‘traditional

Russian peasant’. 31 If anything, it was precisely the fluidity of the lines separating

contemporary popular and elite cultures, evident most clearly in the annual Yuletide

caroling processions (slavlenie) organized at Court by the members of the tsar’s so-called

“Unholy Council,” that made the very notions of ‘nobility’ and ‘baseness’, ‘tradition’ and

‘modernity’, ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ so central to this process of contestation and

re-definition.

Still, the institutionalization of what James Cracraft has called Peter’s ‘cultural

revolution’, not only in the political economy of Church and State, but also in

architecture and language, 32 over the course of his thirty-nine-year reign, left the tsar’s

contemporaries with little doubt about either the fact that Peter made a difference or the

nature of the difference that Peter made. It was not just a matter of the financial and

physical hardships caused by increased burdens placed by his regime’s activist domestic

and foreign policy; nor of the enforced joy prescribed by a new calendar teeming with

obligatory celebrations of imperial name-days and Petrine military victories; 33 but, rather,

of the idea that both the burdens and the victories were part of the divine plan that Peter

came to fulfil in this world, a revelation of God’s will that transformed life as they knew

it in such a way as to preclude a return to the status quo ante. As with the ancient

theological controversy over the filioque clause, which came to divide Christianity into

Latins and Orthodox, 34 Peter’s attempt to be both Father (of the Fatherland) and Son (of

Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich) transformed him into the (Un)holy Ghost of Russian history,

that is, nothing less than the spiritual embodiment of ‘difference’ itself. 35 Regardless of

whether it materialized in the rationalistic esprit of the Enlightenment project or the

Zitser, p. 20
dialectic logic of the Hegelian Weltgeist, the procession of Peter’s ghost through history

became the watchword for those who eagerly expected the imminent advent of Russian

modernity. Whether that historical End Time was invoked in its liberal or Marxist guise,

Peter’s name came to personify the guiding principle or rule of action of all self-

professed modernists. Indeed, it is not in contemporary politics of the reign, but in the

retrospective reconstruction of succeeding generations that we must seek the roots of the

transformation by which the millenarian political ideology of Peter’s Court became the

dogmatic orthodoxy of Russian modernity.

Working under the influence of the texts and artefacts left behind by the ‘Janus

generation’, 36 Peter’s successors adopted a literalist interpretation of the reign of Imperial

Russia’s ‘Founding Father’, one that divided Russian history into a time before Peter

came into the world and the time after his historical incarnation. This periodization of

modern Russian history came to constitute an integral part of a hegemonic, paternalistic

imperial discourse that identified Russia’s anointed monarch as the God-like creator of a

new political dispensation, which his own labours and personal sacrifices helped to usher

into the world. 37 It did not much matter in such a discursive field whether any of the

changes that Peter advocated—such as the administrative separation between the judicial

and legislative branches of government or the codification of Russian laws—were

actually implemented during his reign, or if they lasted much beyond it. For example, it

is standard to acknowledge (and then, just as quickly, to dismiss) the fact that even such

symbolic Petrine institutions as the imperial navy rotted on the docks until the latter part

of the eighteenth-century; or that Peter’s own grandson considered abandoning St.

Petersburg for Moscow—an unrealized ambition that, nevertheless, does suggest that the

Zitser, p. 21
status of Russia’s new Imperial capital was not resolved for quite a while after Peter’s

death. The same goes for the very notion of Russia as an empire (imperiia), a change that

took many decades to be recognized by the world’s diplomatic community. 38 Merely

ticking off the number of years an institution created in Peter’s reign lasted beyond it—

Senate for 206 years; Synod for 197; poll tax for 163; peasant mass-conscription, 170 39—

does not address the fact that in most cases, these institutions changed so radically after

the tsar’s death that the only thing that they retained in common with the reign of Peter

the Great was the foreign-sounding name and the point of origin.

In the end, the difference that Peter made comes down to the idea that the Petrine

moment inaugurated a new, modern era in Russian history. Invariably, this era, like that

of the coming messiah, is constantly deferred and is just waiting to be fulfilled in some

unspecified time yet-to-come—a situation that explains why this Christological

interpretation of Russian history can be, and has been, profitably invoked both by those

who seek to build a church upon the foundations that Peter the Great laid, as well as by

those who would revolt against it. While it is possible to rebel against aspects of one’s

Petrine heritage, and even go so far as to claim to renounce it, ultimately one cannot

escape it, since it has become an unquestioned shibboleth, the very basis for an

individual’s standing within the modern Russian body politic and of Russia’s

membership in the community of modern nations. In the final analysis, the fact that both

the pessimist and the optimist are speaking about the same vessel from which they have

received communion explains why both sides of the debate about the origins of Russian

modernity remain either devout, practising, or lapsed ‘Petrovians’, 40 that is, members of a

chosen people, which is always already predestined—come hell or high-water—to reach

Zitser, p. 22
safe harbour. 41 This is the central mystery that is re-enacted each and every time that

anyone, regardless of his political, ethnic, or religious affiliation, invokes the difference

that Peter made.

As long as the history of late-Muscovite and early Imperial Russia continues to be

discussed in modernist terms, historians will continue to debate whether Peter the Great

was a ‘reformer’ or a ‘revolutionary’—a problem that is as irresistible, and ultimately as

insoluble as the one debated by the theologians who sought to identify the exact moment

in the liturgy when the Eucharistic wine is transformed into the blood of Christ. But how

would our understanding of the Petrine project change if we focused not on the quality of

the wine or the age of the bottle, but on ‘beings and their relationships’ and ‘the networks

that construct’ the very notions of ‘irreversibility and reversibility’? 42 What if instead of

trumpeting the Russian empire’s ‘glorious, albeit painful conquests’ or merely

denouncing them as a revolutionary ‘catastrophe’, 43 we were to construct a non-

teleological, anthropologically-informed narrative around the interconnections between

those individuals, ideas, and objects that defined the ‘horizon of expectation’ in Petrine

Russia? 44 We do not know, because such a history is yet to be written. For now, the form

that the Petrine ship of state might assume in such a narrative still remains only a distant

silhouette on the horizon. What is already clear, however, is that when it does come into

full view, it will undoubtedly look less like Pushkin’s ‘newly-launched’ man-of-war than

Bruno Latour’s ‘great ocean liner that slows down and then comes to a standstill in the

Sargasso Sea’. 45 That is, it will seem less like a sacrosanct relic of a quasi-mythological

‘culture hero’ than like an emblem of a specific historical moment in the perennial

Zitser, p. 23
struggle over which set of social actors gets to appropriate the ‘time-bending’ power of

human artefacts and, thereby, to shape collective memory itself. 46

Zitser, p. 24
Figure 1: Peter Picart, Engraved frontispiece, The Naval Statute (St. Petersburg, 1720).
The text of the poem reads: ‘Divine Providence unveils [for us] that which in Time is
carried out according to His will. The unthinkable is possible if Divine Providence
makes it so. For His thoughts and ways are as removed from us as the distance between
the heavens and the earth’. Source: S. A. Chistiakov, Istoriia Petra Velikago … s
kartinami, portretami, avtografami, medaliami i pr. i pr. na otdel'nykh tablitsakh i v
tekste, 3rd. ed. (S.-Peterburg: Izd. T-va. M. O. Vol'f [1903]), 318.

Zitser, p. 25
Figure 2: Unsigned engraving from Naval Scenes (St. Petersburg, 1718). Source:
Division of Rare Books, Russian Academy of Sciences Library, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Zitser, p. 26
Figure 3: Peter’s personal ring- seal: “I am in the rank of a student and seek those who
can teach me.” Source: S. A. Kniaz’kov, Ocherki iz istorii Petra Velikogo i ego vremeni
(Moscow, 1909), 683 p.: ill.; 27 cm.

Zitser, p. 27
Further Reading

Anisimov, Evgenii V., The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Coercion in

Russia, trans. John T. Alexander (Armonk, NY: 1993)

Bushkovitch, Paul, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Collis, Robert, The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism and Science at the Court

of Peter the Great, 1689-1725 (Leiden: Brill, 2012)

Cracraft, James, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago, 1988)

Cracraft, James, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago: 1997)

Cracraft, James, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, MA: 2004).

Hughes, Lindsey, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1998)

Hughes, Lindsey, Peter the Great: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2002)

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)

Zitser, Ernest A., The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority

at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)

Notes
1
Russian National Library, f. 850 (S. P. Shevyrev), l. 16, cited in Viktor Zhivov, ‘O

prevratnostiakh istorii, ili o nezavershennosti istoricheskikh paradigm’, in Kul'turnye

Zitser, p. 28
praktiki v ideologicheskoi perspektive. Rossiia, XVIII-nachalo XX veka, special issue of

Rossiia/Russia, 3:11 (1999), 245-60, here 249.

2
E. V. Anisimov, ‘Petr I: rozhdenie imperii’, Voprosy istorii, 7 (1989), 3-21, translated

as ‘Peter I: Birth of an Empire’, ed. Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Studies in History, 30

(1991), 6-29.
3
E.V. Anisimov, Vremia petrovskikh reform (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989), 115; idem, The

Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Coercion in Russia, trans. John T.

Alexander (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 66.

4
Anisimov, ‘Peter I: Birth of an Empire’, 7, quoting A. S. Pushkin, ‘Moia rodoslovnaia:

(‘Smeias’ zhestoko nad sobratom...’) [1830]’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh

(Leningrad: Nauka, 1977), 3: 197-9. Significantly, Anisimov does not mention the fact

that the analogy between the Russian Orthodox tsar and Christ-the-Helmsman was part of

a long literary tradition in Russian panegyrical poetry. See L. I. Sazonova, Literaturnaia

kul'tura Rossii: rannee novoe vremia (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2006), 408.

Nor does he pick up on the messianic subtext of Pushkin’s analogy between the royal and

divine helmsmen, which is most apparent in the poet’s description of the millenarian

significance of Peter’s advent for the development of modern Russian culture: ‘Finally

there came Peter. Russia entered Europe like a ship newly launched—to the sound of

hammers and the thunder of guns. But the wars which Peter the Great undertook were

beneficent and fruitful. The successful transformation of the whole nation was the result

of the battle of Poltava, and European culture weighed anchor on the shores of the

conquered Neva’. See A. S. Pushkin, ‘On the Insignificance of Russian Literature’

(1834), in Pushkin on Literature, selected, ed. and trans. Tatiana Wolff, with an

Zitser, p. 29
introductory study by John Bayley, rev. ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998),

352-8, here 353.

5
For example, despite its explicit revisionism, Anisimov’s discussion of Petrine reforms

is situated squarely within the context of a binary opposition between the ‘revolutionary’

tsar and his ‘tradition’-bound ‘opponents’. Anisimov stresses the coercive nature of

Petrine ‘regularity’, a ‘concept that reflected the urge to uniformity and unification on the

basis of western European principles about the sphere of public life’. As he notes, Peter’s

‘victory’ over ‘domestic foes’ was achieved ‘not only by harsh punitive measures (the

executioner’s block, the galleys, Siberia, etc.), but also by expunging that which had been

so hateful to Peter from youth—“the old”—a concept opposed to “regularity” and firmly

linked to the beard, long sleeves, the apparent chaos of Russian town building,

superstitions, and customs based on traditions’, including those surrounding the

Muscovite organization of time: Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great, 218.

Anisimov’s stance is reminiscent of the views of Bruno Latour’s ‘antimoderns’: ‘Always

on the defensive, they consistently believed what the moderns said about themselves and

proceeded to affix the opposite sign to each declaration. Antirevolutionary, they held the

same peculiar views as the moderns about time past and tradition […]. Except for the

plus or minus sign, moderns and antimoderns share all the same convictions’. Bruno

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (London: Harvester

Wheatsheaf, 1993), 134, 123.

6
For a survey, see Ernest A. Zitser, ‘Post-Soviet Peter: New Histories of the Late

Muscovite and Early Imperial Russian Court’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and

Eurasian History, 6 (2005), 375-92.

Zitser, p. 30
7
For a discussion of this engraving, see M. A. Alekseeva, Graviura petrovskogo vremeni

(Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1990), 185, 187-9, 202n. 57; and James Cracraft, The Petrine

Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 175-6, fig. 47.
8
Ernest A. Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority

at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 80-7. On the

popularity of the nautical analogy between the Ship of Jesus and the community of the

faithful (Orthodox Church) in seventeenth-century Muscovy, see M.B. Pliukhanova, ‘O

natsional’nykh sredstvakh samoopredeleniia lichnosti: samosakralizatsiiia,

samosozhzhenie, plavanie na korable’, Iz istorii russkoi kul'tury, 2nd ed. (Moscow,

1999), 3: 380-459, here 408-10.

9
Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001).

10
D. Iu. Guzevich and I. D. Guzevich, Velikoe posol’stvo: rubezh epokh, ili nachalo puti,

1697-1698, 2nd edn, expanded and corrected (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2008).
11
As Donald Ostrowski has pointed out, for example, ‘The meaning of the term

“modernization” ... depends on the standpoint of the person using it. As such, it can be

used in two broad senses: relative to the time, in the sense of adopting then state-of-

the-art innovations; and relative to the present. ... One of the problems with using

the term “modernization” is that the two senses of the term are often merged, so that

particular institutions of a pre-modern country are evaluated as more or less modern not

in relation to its contemporaries but in terms of where its contemporaries would be in the

present’. From this viewpoint, ‘Russia is often presented as being behind Europe in

historical development, and insofar as Russia “Europeanizes” it is considered to be

Zitser, p. 31
modernizing. As a result, Peter is seen as the great modernizer because he is the great

Europeanizer’: Donald Ostrowski, ‘The End of Muscovy: The Case for ca. 1800’,

Slavic Review, 69 (2010), 426-38, here 428-9.

12
V. Iu. Matveev, “Emblematika lichnykh pechatei Petra I,” in Geral’dika: materialy i

issledovaniia: Sbornik nauchnykh statei, ed. G. V. Vilinbakhov (Leningrad, 1987), 70-83,

here 72. For a discussion of the para-Masonic symbolism on the tsar’s personal ring seal,

see Ernest A. Zitser, ‘A Mason-Tsar?: Freemasonry and Fraternalism at the Court of

Peter the Great’, in Freemasonry and Fraternalism in Eighteenth-Century Russia, eds.

Andreas Önnerfors and Robert Collis (Sheffield: Centre for Research into Freemasonry

and Fraternalism, University of Sheffield, 2009), 7-32, here 8-9.

13
On the significance of this ‘Southern Petersburg’, see Robert E. Jones, ‘Why St.

Petersburg?’ in Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives, ed. Lindsey Hughes

(Basingstoke: Palgrave), 189-205; Nikolai Petrukhintsev, “Doroga k Peterburgu,”

Rodina, 11 (2007), 7-14; and Brian J. Boeck, ‘When Peter I Was Forced to Settle for

Less: Coerced Labor and Resistance in a Failed Russian Colony (1695–1711)’, The

Journal of Modern History 80 (2008), 485–514.

14
Edward J. Phillips, The Founding of Russia’s Navy: Peter the Great and the Azov Fleet,

1688-1714 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), ch. 1.

15
From Gk. pōgōn = beard. See Lindsey Hughes, ‘“A Beard is an Unnecessary Burden”:

Peter I’s Laws on Shaving and their Roots in Early Russia’, in Russian Society and

Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Anthony G. Cross, ed.

Roger Bartlett and Lindsey Hughes (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004), 22-34.

Zitser, p. 32
16
Pushkin, ‘Poltava’ [1828-1829], in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:180-224, here 214.

According to Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History

and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 89, ‘[i]t was from Pushkin's

“Poltava” that Russian schoolchildren learned about that momentous battle, by heart’;

and thanks to this poem, ‘such phrases as the “fledglings of Peter's nest” [...], for Peter

the Great’s assistants, became part of the Russian language’. Lidiia Sazonova has

suggested that the famous line from Pushkin’s ‘Poltava’ must be seen as part of a long-

standing tradition in Russian panegyrical literature, which used aquiline heraldic

symbolism (viz., the double-headed eagle depicted on the state seal) to exalt members of

the Romanov dynasty, and by association, their political supporters: Sazonova,

Literaturnaia kul'tura Rossii, 385-98, here 396. Pushkin’s characterization of Peter’s

comrades-in-arms, minus the poet’s self-conscious reference to the earlier literary

tradition, was adopted by the dean of Soviet Petrine studies, N. I. Pavlenko, Ptentsy

gnezda Petrova (Moscow: Mysl’, 1989); and Poluderzhavnyi vlastelin: istoricheskaia

khronika o zhizni spodvizhnika Petra Pervogo A.D. Menshikova (Moscow: Izd-vo polit.

lit-ry, 1991).
17
Paul Bushkovitch, ‘Cultural Change among the Russian Boyars, 1650-1680: New

Sources and Old Problems‘, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 56 (2000),

91-112; and his Peter the Great, 434-42; Marshall T. Poe with Ol’ga Kosheleva, Russell

Martin, and Boris Morozov, The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century (Helsinki:

FASL, 2004); P. L. Sedov, Zakat moskovskogo tsarstva: tsarskii dvor kontsa XVII veka

(St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2006); and D. O. Serov, Administratsiia Petra I

(Moscow: OGI, 2007).

Zitser, p. 33
18
L. Jay Oliva, Russia in the Era of Peter the Great (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-

Hall, 1969), 29.

19
Evgenii Anisimov, Gosudarstvennye preobrazovaniia i samoderzhavie Petra Velikogo

v pervoi chetverti XVIII veka (St. Petersburg: D-B, 1997), 14, 106-7.
20
Robert Collis, The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism and Science at the Court

of Peter the Great, 1689-1725 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

21
On Leibniz’s belief that the Russian monarch should cultivate ‘until completion, the

plantation entrusted to him by God’, see Collis, The Petrine Instauration, 11, 366-74; see

also, Michael D. Gordin, ‘The Importation of Being Earnest: The Early St. Petersburg

Academy of Sciences’, Isis, 91 (2000), 1–31.

22
On Jacobite servitors, see Collis, The Petrine Instauration, 49-207; and, more

generally, Rebecca Wills, The Jacobites and Russia, 1715-1750 (East Linton: Tuckwell,

2002). On Pietism, see the classic study of Eduard Winter, Halle als Ausgangspunkt der

deutschen Russlandkunde im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1953).

23
See S. I. Nikolaev, Literaturnaia kul’tura petrovskoi epokhi (St. Petersburg: D-B,

1996), 11-13.
24
See A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii, 1700-1740 gg. (Moscow:

Drevlekhranilishche, 2000).
25
A point made most recently by N. N. Petrukhintsev, ‘Petr I i ego epokha: stereotipy

istoricheskogo vospriiatiia i perspektivy ikh preodoleniia’, in Petr Velikii: reformator

Rossii, ed. N. S. Vladimirskaia et. al. (Moscow: Gos. istoriko-kul’turnyi muzei-

zapovednik ‘Moskovskii Kreml’’, 2001), 25-33.

Zitser, p. 34
26
Marc Raeff, Peter the Great, Reformer or Revolutionary? (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1966);

idem, Peter the Great Changes Russia, ed. with an intro. by Marc Raeff 2nd ed.

(Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1972).

27
Ol’ga Kosheleva, “Ne vse li to ego zavody?” Vozmozhno li dal’neishee izuchenie

Petrovskikh reform?’ Rodina, 11 (2007), 15-18.

28
Iu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, ‘Echoes of the Notion “Moscow the Third Rome”

in Peter the Great’s Ideology’, trans. N.F.C. Owen, in The Semiotics of Russian Culture,

ed. Ann Shukman (Ann Arbor: Dept of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of

Michigan, 1984); V. M. Zhivov and B. A. Uspenskii, ‘Tsar’ i Bog: Semioticheskie

aspekty sakralizatsii monarkha v Rossii’, in Iazyki kul’tury i problemy perevodimosti, ed.

B. A. Uspenskii (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 47-154; V. M. Zhivov, ‘Kul’turnye reformy v

sisteme preobrazovanii Petra I’, in Iz istorii russkoi kul’tury, ed. A. D. Koshelev

(Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1996), 3:528-83.

29
Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom, ch. 5; idem, ‘“Moi Gavrilushka”: Fallicheskaia

simvolika kul’ta lichnosti Petra Velikogo’, Rodina, 11 (2007), 113-16.

30
Mariia Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, ‘Kontseptsiia voiny u Feofan Prokopovicha i

offitsial’naia ideologiia petrovskoi epokhi’, in Lotmanovskii sbornik, 3 (2004), 899-911.

31
Raeff, ‘Introduction’, Peter the Great Changes Russia, ix-xxii.
32
See Cracraft’s magisterial trilogy on Russia’s first ‘cultural revolution’: The Petrine

Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988); The

Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997); and

The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the

Harvard University Press, 2004).

Zitser, p. 35
33
Elena Pogosian, Petr I—arkhitektor rossiiskoi istorii (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB,

2001).
34
The Latin word filioque (‘and from the Son’), inserted in the Western version of the

Nicene creed to assert the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son as

well as from the Father, is not admitted by the Eastern Church.

35
For a cogent discussion of this notion, see Jeremy Hawthorn, A Glossary of

Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Arnold, 1998), 80-82. Cf. Dragan Kujundzic,

‘“After”: Russian Post-Colonial Identity’, MLN, 115, No. 5, Comparative Literature Issue

(Dec. 2000), 892-908.

36
M. B. Iasinskaia, ‘K predystorii salonnogo iazyka v XVIII veke (na materiale

sochinenii kniazia B. I. Kurakina)’, in Ot slova k delu: sbornik dokladov (Moscow,

2003), 433-41, here 433.

37
See the discussion in Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great; Lindsey Hughes,

Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 462-70;

eadem, Peter the Great: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), chs 11-

12; and Russell E. Martin, ‘The Petrine Divide and the Periodization of Early Modern

Russian History’, Slavic Review 69 (2010), 410-25.

38
Isabel de Madariaga, ‘From Tsar to Emperor’,’ in her Politics and Culture in

Eighteenth-Century Russia: Collected Essays (Harlow: Longman, 1998), 15-39, here

39, n.91.
39
Anisimov, ‘Rozhdenie imperii’, 3.
40
In 1846, Faddei Bulgarin (1789-1859) approvingly quoted the late Minister of Finance

Count E. F. Kankrin: ‘If we consider the matter thoroughly, then, in justice, we must be

Zitser, p. 36
called not Russians, but Petrovians [...]. Eveything: glory, power, prosperity, and

enlightenment, we owe to the Romanov family; and, out of gratitude, we should change

our tribal name of Slavs to the name of the creator of the empire and its well-being.

Russia should be called Petrovia, and we Petrovians; or the empire should be named

Romanovia, and we—Romanovites’. As Riasanovsky points out, ‘[t]his was not the only

suggestion to rename Russia “Petrovia”: Riasanovsky The Image of Peter the Great, 109,

n.49; idem, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1959), 139, n.181.

41
The Petrine covenant is the main theme of the medal depicting Noah’s Ark after the

Deluge, which was struck to commemorate the conclusion of the Northern War. It is also

the leitmotiv of Aleksandr Sokurov’s film, Russian Ark (2002). For a discussion of the

Petrine theme in Sokurov’s movie, see Ernest Zitser and Pamela J. Kachurin, ‘After the

Deluge: Russian Ark and the (Ab)uses of History’, NewsNet: News of the American

Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 43 (2003), 17-22.

42
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 77.
43
Discussing the difference in views between ‘modernizers’ and their opponents, Latour,

We Have Never Been Modern, 123, observes: ‘The tragedy [of modern man] becomes

more painful still when the antimoderns, taking what the moderns say about themselves

at face value, want to save something from what looks to them like a shipwreck. […]

[I]nstead of seeing these processes as the modernizers do—as glorious, albeit painful,

conquests—the antimoderns see the situation as an unparalleled catastrophe. Except for

the plus or minus sign, moderns and antimoderns share all the same convictions. The

Zitser, p. 37
postmoderns, always perverse, accept the idea that the situation is indeed catastrophic,

but they maintain that it is to be acclaimed rather than bemoaned!’

44
Reinhart Koselleck, ‘“Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two

Historical Categories’, in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of

Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 267-88.
45
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 77: ‘Like a great ocean liner that slows down

and then comes to a standstill in the Sargasso Sea, the moderns’ notion of time has been

suspended.’ He continues: ‘It was the systematic connection of entities in a coherent

whole that constituted the flow of modern time. Now that this laminary flow has become

turbulent, we can give up analyses of the empty framework of temporality and return to

passing time—that is, to beings and their relationships, to the networks that construct

irreversibility and reversibility.’ Compare this quotation to Alexander Nagel’s and

Christopher S. Woods’ discussion of the ‘Ship of Theseus’, ‘the prototypical ship-of-

state’, which functioned ‘both as a marker of a great span of time (the history of Athens)

and as a stable instrument in a living ritual (the annual votive mission to Delos)’. In both

cases, a nautical metaphor illustrates the authors’ attempt to write a post-modern history,

one that quite deliberately seeks ‘to reject linear chronology as the inevitable matric of

experience and cognition’. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic

Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 8-9.

46
Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 9-10.

Zitser, p. 38