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This chapter describes 18th-century Russia after the death of Peter the Great as representing a distinct period in the history of Russian culture. It explains that this period marked a decisive break with the Muscovite past—although that break had been foreshadowed and assisted by earlier influences and trends. It adds that 18th-century Russia was an age of apprenticeship and imitation par excellence. It discusses that the death of Peter the Great was followed by a certain relaxation and reaction against his rule: the schools established by Peter could find no students, while intrigue and corruption ran rampant in government and administration. It explains that the Enlightenment image of Peter the great dominated 18th-century Russian thought and literature. The chapter also evaluates Catherine the Great's beliefs and principles, as well as her leadership.

This chapter discusses the momentous reign of Peter the Great and its impact and influence on Russian intellectual life and culture. It explains that the dominant European intellectual climate of the “Enlightenment,” or “Age of Reason” fit Peter the Great's character, orientation, and ambitions. It adds that his optimistic belief in reason, in the possibility and feasibility of reasonable solutions to human problems, ranging from technical matters of administration, economics, or finance to the broader issues of the nature of a genuine education, or of an ideal society and polity, constituted the leading inspiration of the age. It describes Peter the Great as an absolute ruler in theory and in practice. It tells of the reorganization of the Church in Russia—a long-lasting, logical, and integral part of Peter the Great's effort to modernize and even Westernize Russia.

This chapter explores the philosophes’ responses to developments in the Russian empire. Newly forged western skills and ideas made exceptional and impressive progress in Muscovy before 1750 but only, seemingly, due to the exceptional zeal and energy with which one particular despot, Tsar Peter I (reigned 1689–1725), imported new ideas and expertise from the West while expressly setting out to attack custom and tradition. If the official ideology of the Russian Enlightenment engendered a new cult of tsarist autocracy — a pragmatic philosophy even more authoritarian than that of the newly ‘enlightened’ Prussian monarchy of Frederick the Great, or that of Maria Theresa in the Habsburg lands — the only other significant ‘enlightenment’ in eastern Europe before 1750, that flourishing among the newly thriving south-east European Greek diaspora, was itself fervently Russophile and authoritarian in attitude. Politically as well as religiously, culturally, and intellectually, the two indigenously east European ‘enlightenments’ were firmly linked.

Peter the Great did not come to the throne in August 1689 of a country possessing a simple, organic religious culture. The previous two centuries were periods of continuous change, gathering speed after 1645. The starting point of these changes was the decline of the authority and central importance of monasticism, a decline that is visible after about 1530. Another large implication is that the evolution of religion in Russia in these centuries led the country down a road that rapidly converged with that of Western Europe. Both Reformation and Counter Reformation had resulted in an enormous increase in the role of preaching among Protestants and Catholics. The evolution of religious life and thought inside Russia brought the country up to the gate of Europe. Peter opened it.

This chapter analyzes Falconet's design of the monument to Peter the Great. It suggests that by endowing the monument with an aura of ambiguity, Falconet challenged viewers to draw a parallel between the precariously balanced tsar and the Russia created by him, a community which had lost its sense of wholeness and social harmony in a contest between the forces of modernization and the staying power of conservatism, between an open and a closed society, and between an autocrat and an enlightened ruler.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the equestrian monument as political art and Peter the Great's idea to commission a monument to himself in his own lifetime. It then describes Catherine the Great's appointment of Etienne-Maurice Falconet to create a new monument to Peter the Great; Prince Dmitry Alekseevich Golitsyn, Russia's minister plenipotentiary in Paris, who helped in the selection of Falconet; and the work done by Falconet before his trip to Russia.

This chapter examines the city's experience during the Great Northern War (1700–1721). The end results of this war were the destruction of Swedish power in the Baltic Sea and Russia's acquisition of several new ports, including Riga. The chapter focuses on the actions of three powerful monarchs, Charles XII of Sweden, Augustus II of Poland-Saxony, and Peter I of Russia, as they clashed over the eastern Baltic. Its principal concern, however, is the experience of Rigans during these extraordinary times. The chapter ends with a scene of devastation in the starving and bombed-out city of Riga as its terrified residents surrendered to the victorious Russian state. It was in this manner that more than two centuries of tsarist dominion over Riga began in 1710.

This chapter examines how unofficial and countertraditional representations of Russian history charted subterranean relationships between the tsars and between the conceptions of collective greatness associated primarily with Peter and of historical trauma tied to Ivan's name. As the historical writings of Hegelians such as Konstantin Kavelin and as Aleksandr Pushkin's masterwork The Bronze Horseman each reveal, in the historical thought of Official Nationality, Peter's greatness is predicated on a disavowal of the mayhem and trauma of his reign; analogously, Ivan may just as easily be viewed as a hero as a tyrant, with the worst excesses of his reign recast as historically necessary bloodshed. In sum, the two figures were from the start of the century used to construct collective identity on a base of disavowed trauma.

This chapter turns to middle and late nineteenth-century traditions in representations of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. It focuses on stories of intergenerational conflict and violence that served as allegories for contemporary politics and social life in this era, obsessed as it was with problems of “fathers and children.” It shows that late nineteenth-century Russians debated the achievements and costs of coerced modernization by contemplating the deaths of Ivan's son Ivan and Peter's son Aleksei at the hands of their respective fathers. Interestingly, while the death of the Tsarevich Aleksei was largely a topic of historical analysis by the leading historians of the day—including Mikhail Pogodin, Sergei Solovev, and Nikolai Kostomarov—Ivan's inadvertent killing of the Tsarevich Ivan (or of fictional children), was most prominently the subject of plays and operas—by Aleksei K. Tolstoi, Lev Mei, and Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov, among others. The chapter concludes by investigating how the portrayals of these father-son confrontations in two historical paintings by Nikolai Ge and Ilia Repin offer not only an additional treatment of violence and power in Russian history but also a metahistorical reflection on the tension between the divergent approaches of historiography and cultural life to the Russian past.

This chapter investigates how Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great served during the first half of the nineteenth century to articulate conceptions of collective selfhood in foundational texts of Russian historiography—Nikolai Karamzin's monumental History of the Russian State and Nikolai Ustrialov's textbook Russian History—as well as in the historical novels The Last Novice by Ivan Lazhechnikov and Prince Serebriannyi by Aleksei K. Tolstoi. Although dominant conceptions of Russian history of this period adopted Peter as a transcendent, heroic “father of the fatherland” and Ivan as a depraved tyrant, each ruler functioned in his own way as a liminal figure, serving to demarcate the boundaries of collective selfhood in Russian ideological formulations.

The late Martin Malia, professor emeritus of history at the University of California–Berkeley and author of the famous “Z” article, assessed Putin's policy decisions in the pre-Beslan phase in a refreshingly nuanced interview in April 2000. He explained that Putin could not be Peter the Great because the twenty-first century is not the eighteenth, and modernization or Westernization means much more than an army or a navy. He pointed out that he must make Russia advanced technologically, and that means fostering education. Advanced technology and education mean an independent-minded, diverse, civil society.

This chapter traces the emergence of Stalinist historical revisionism from the 1920s to the 1930s, analyzing in detail the central place of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great in the Short Course in the History of the USSR, edited by Andrei Shestakov. Although the historiography and public discourse of the 1930s announced the new approach to the Russian national past as a complete break with both the prerevolutionary tradition and the historiography of the 1920s associated with the name of Mikhail Pokrovskii, Stalinist visions of the past are in fact best understood as an inheritance from imperial historiography, mediated by Pokrovskii's work. Furthermore, while articulation of the new historical orthodoxy of the 1930s was managed by party elites, it was not simply as imposed “from above” on Soviet public culture. Instead, it emerged from and responded to the exigencies of the historical imagination of the 1920s, which continued to see the present through the lens of Russian history and through the allegorical figures of Ivan and Peter.

This chapter analyzes representations of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great in the cultural life of the 1930s and 1940s. It turns first to the case of Aleksei N. Tolstoi and his many works on Peter the Great. This body of work exemplifies the extent to which even of some of the most orthodox contributions to Stalinist historical mythmaking depended on sensitivity to the ironic undertow of history's own history of use and reuse. It then examines Sergei Eisenstein's second film in his uncompleted trilogy of works on Ivan the Terrible. It reads this film not as an exercise in “Aesopean” critique via historical allegory, as it is most commonly seen, but rather as a stunning achievement in metahistorical analysis. It argues that Eisenstein's film should ultimately be seen not as a willful “send up” of Stalin in the guise of Ivan but as a higher order of subversion—a meditation on and critique of Stalinist historical practices as such.

This introductory chapter describes Russia's early history and the founding of St. Petersburg. It considers the accomplishments of Peter the Great and how he dragged Russia out of its medieval backwater and into the modern age. Peter's revolution went far deeper than the external manifestations of modernization—changes in the liturgy, calendar, and alphabet, Western garb, and shaved-off beards. He unraveled the threads that made up the tissue of Russian society and replaced them with new ones of his own making. The chapter also discusses the French domination of the Russian cultural scene and the unveiling of Peter's statue in 1782.

This chapter discusses Catherine the Great's deliberate cultivation of a friendship with Falconet and their exchange of correspondence; perceptions about Marie-Anne Collot's relationship with Falconet, who accompanied him to Russia; Falconet's feud with Ivan Ivanovich Betskoi, who was tasked with overseeing the construction of the monument to Peter the Great; and the large model of the monument.

This chapter describes the complex cultural layering in Lourié’s post-Symbolist opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Greatas a palimpsest—in Olga Matich’s words, “a metaphor of storing suppressed cultural memory” and “a vision of history in which the past is hidden or veiled but never erased.” The chapter begins with a reconstruction of Lourié’s painful departure from Russia and parting with his onetime lover Anna Akhmatova before considering the explicit and implicit relationship between The Blackamoor of Peter the Great and Akhmatova’s eulogistic, semiautobiographical Poem Without a Hero.The chapter provides a line-by-line explication of the libretto of the opera, which combines the source Pushkin text with references to and borrowings from numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian and European writers. Móricz focuses her musical discussion on the balletic divertissement “The Birth of Eros” in act 1 and the final scene of the opera. Reference is also made to Lourié’s Zaklinaniya (Incantations), a collection of five miniatures to words by Akhmatova, and to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose conception of time finds reflection in the work of the Russian Symbolists.

This chapter considers Silver Age representations of of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, with particular focus on Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's historical novel Antichrist (Peter and Aleksei) and Pavel Miliukov's The Outlines of Russian Cultural History. By the start of the twentieth century, the reigns of the two rulers had come to serve as the primary foundational myths of Russian political and social life. The ambivalence of these myths between stories of greatness and stories of terror, rather than diminishing their capacity to provide meaningful explanations of Russian history, had rendered them “all-purpose” instruments for interpreting political experience, capable of explaining any event and “predicting” any outcome. Ultimately, these qualities of multivalence and ubiquitous utility ensured that even after the revolutions of 1917, the historical myths of Ivan and Peter were to retain their relevance for later generations and formulations of collective identity.

This chapter considers the legacy of Falconet. The discussions include how his monument captures the enigmatic essence of Russia; how it has securely planted itself in the minds of the Petersburgers; and the poetry it has inspired.