elite and from outside it. The most prominent of the newcomers were his favorite, the talented and corrupt Alexander Menshikov (1673-1729), whom he made a prince, and Paul Yaguzhinsky, who became the first Procurator-General. Top men from the traditional elite included General Boris Sheremetev, Chancellor Gavrila Golovkin, Admiral Fyodor Apraksin and Prince Fyodor Romodanov-sky. The chief publicist was the Ukrainian churchman Feofan Prokopovich. It is a misconception that Peter relied on foreigners and commoners.
Religious traditionalists abhorred Peter, identifying him as the Antichrist. The several revolts of his reign all included some elements of antagonism toward foreigners and foreign innovations such as shaving and Western dress, along with more standard and substantive complaints about the encroachment of central authority, high taxes, poor conditions of service, and remuneration. The most serious were the musketeer revolt of 1698, the Astrakhan revolt of 1705, and the rebellion led by the
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Don Cossack Ivan Bulavin in 1707-1708. The disruption that worried Peter most, however, affected his inner circle. Peter was married twice: in 1689 to the noblewoman Yevdokia Lopukhina, whom he banished to a convent in 1699, and in 1712 to Catherine, a former servant girl from Livonia whom he met around 1703. He groomed the surviving son of his first marriage, Alexei Petrovich (1690-1718), as his successor, but they had a troubled relationship. In 1716 Alexei fled abroad. Lured back to Russia in 1718, he was tried and condemned to death for treason, based on unfounded charges of a plot to assassinate his father. Many of Alexei’s associates were executed, and people in leading circles were suspected of sympathy for him. Peter and Catherine had at least ten children (the precise number is unknown), but only two girls reached maturity: Anna and Elizabeth (who reigned as empress from 1741 to 1761). In 1722 Peter issued a new Law of Succession by which the reigning monarch nominated his own successor, but he failed to record his choice before his death (from a bladder infection) in February (January O.S.) 1725. Immediately after Peter’s death, Menshikov and some leading courtiers with guards’ support backed Peter’s widow, who reigned as Catherine I (1725-1727).
VIEWS OF PETER AND HIS REFORMS
The official view in the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth was that Peter had “given birth” to Russia, transforming it from “non-existence” into “being.” Poets represented him as Godlike. The man and his methods were easily accommodated in later eighteenth-century discourses of Enlightened Absolutism. Even during Peter’s lifetime, however, questions were raised about the heavy cost of his schemes and the dangers of abandoning native culture and institutions. As the Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin commented in 1810: “Truly, St. Petersburg is founded on tears and corpses.” He believed that Peter had made Russians citizens of the world, but prevented them from being Russians. Hatred of St. Petersburg as a symbol of alien traditions was an important element in the attitude of nineteenth-century Slavophiles, who believed that only the peasants had retained Russian cultural values. To their Western-izer opponents, however, Peter’s reforms, stopping short of Western freedoms, had not gone far enough. In the later nineteenth century, serious studies of seventeenth-century Muscovy questioned the revolutionary nature of Peter’s reign, underlining that many of Peter’s reforms and policies, such as hiring foreigners, reforming the army, and borrowing Western culture, originated with his predecessors. The last tsars, especially Nicholas II, took a nostalgic view of pre-Petrine Russia, but Petrine values were revered by the imperial court until its demise.
Soviet historians generally took a bipolar view of Peter’s reign. On the one hand, they believed that Russia had to catch up with the West, whatever the cost; hence they regarded institutional and cultural reforms, the new army, navy, factories, and so on as “progressive.” Territorial expansion was approved. On the other hand, Soviet historians were bound to denounce Peter’s exploitation of the peasantry and to praise popular rebels such as Bulavin; moreover, under Stalin, Peter’s cosmopolitanism was treated with suspicion. Cultural historians in particular stressed native achievements over foreign borrowings. In the 1980s-1990s some began to take a more negative view still, characterizing Peter as “the creator of the administrative-command system and the true ancestor of Stalin” (Anisimov, 1993). After the collapse of the USSR, the secession of parts of the former Empire and Union, and the decline of the armed forces and navy, many people looked back to Peter’s reign as a time when Russia was strong and to Peter as an ideal example of a strong leader. The debate continues. See also: ALEXEI PETROVICH; CATHERINE I; ELIZABETH; FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; MENSHIKOV, ALEXANDER DANILOVICH; PATRIARCHATE; PEASANTRY; SERFDOM; ST. PETERSBURG; TABLE OF RANKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, M. S. (1995). Peter the Great. London: Longman. Anisimov, E. V. (1993). Progress through Coercion: The Reforms of Peter the Great. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Canadian American Slavic Studies. 8 (1974). Issue devoted to Peter’s reign. Cracraft, James. (1971). The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cracraft, James. (1990). The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cracraft, James. (1997). The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Hughes, Lindsey, ed. (2000). Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Hughes, Lindsey. (2002). Peter the Great: A Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kliuchevsky, Vasily. (1958). Peter the Great, tr. L. Archibald. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Pososhkov, Ivan. (1987). The Book of Poverty and Wealth, ed., tr. A. P. Vlasto, L. R. Lewitter. London: The Athlone Press. Raeff, Marc. ed. (1972). Peter the Great Changes Russia. Lexington, MA: Heath. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1984). The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(1715-1730), emperor of Russia, May 1727 to January 1730.
Son of Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich and Princess Charlotte of Wolfenb?ttel, and grandson of Peter I, the future Peter II had an unfortunate start in life. His German mother died soon after his birth, and in 1718 his father died in prison after being tortured and condemned to death for treason. Peter I did not mistreat his grandson, but feared him as a possible rallying point for conservatives. He did not groom him as his heir, and a new Law on Succession (1722) rejected primogeniture and made it possible for the ruler to nominate his successor. During the reign of his step-grandmother, Catherine I (1725-1727), young Peter found himself under the protection of Prince Alexander Menshikov, who betrothed him to his daughter Maria and persuaded Catherine to name him as her successor, in the hope of stealing ground from the old nobility and gaining popularity by restoring the male line. On the day of Catherine’s death, Peter was proclaimed emperor.
For the rest of Peter’s short life it was a question of who could manipulate him before he developed a mind of his own. At first Menshikov kept the emperor under his wing, but, following a bout of illness in the summer of 1727, Menshikov was marginalized then banished by members of the powerful Dolgoruky clan, backed by the emperor’s grandmother, Peter I’s ex-wife Yevdokia. Peter II was crowned in Moscow on March 8 (February 25 O.S.), 1728. His chief adviser was now Prince Alexis Grigorevich Dolgoruky, but the power behind the government was Heinrich Osterman. Both men were members of the Supreme Privy Council. After his coronation Peter stayed in Moscow, where he devoted much of his time to hunting. Portraits show a handsome boy dressed in the latest Western fashion. His short reign has sometimes been associated with a move to reject many of Peter’s reforms, but there is no evidence that Peter II or his circle planned to return to the old ways, even if magnates welcomed the opportunity to spend more time on their Moscow estates. According to one source, young Peter wished to “follow in the steps of his grandfather.” He did not get the chance. In fall 1729 he was betrothed to Prince Dolgoruky’s daughter Catherine, but the wedding never took place. On January 29 (January 18 O.S.), 1730, he died from smallpox, without nominating a successor. The last of the Romanov male line, he was buried in the Archangel Cathedral in Moscow. See also: CATHERINE I; MENSHIKOV, ALEXANDER DANILOVICH; ROMANOV DYNASTY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
