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Many of Peter’s critics and
admirers had, of course, their own political axes to grind,
which helps to explain to some extent the prevalence of either
extremely negative or overwhelmingly positive assessments of
what Peter did to Russia. There have always been commentators,
however, who tried to bridge the gulf between the two
irreconcilable poles of judgment and offer a more balanced and
neutral view of Peter’s achievement. The nineteenth century
critic Dmitri Pisarev, for example, tried to stay above the fray
between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles by contending
that: ‘If indeed Peter overset anything, then he overset only
what was weak and rotten, what would have collapsed of its own
accord. Both the Slavophiles and the Westernizers overestimate
the significance of Peter’s achievement; the former see him as a
corrupter of popular life, the latter, as a sort of a Samson,
who destroyed the wall separating Russia from Europe... Peter’s
work is not at all as pregnant with historic consequences, as it
seems to his enthusiastic admirers and hardened opponents’. |
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The
prominent historian Sergei Platonov, too, denied Peter the title of
a royal revolutionary, arguing that there was no radical break in
political, economic or social development under Peter: ‘Was his
activity traditional, or did it represent a sharp and sudden
revolution in the life of the Muscovite state, for which the
country was entirely unprepared? The answer is quite clear.
Peter’s reforms were not a revolution, either in their substance or
their results. Peter was not a ‘Royal Revolutionary’, as he is
sometimes called’. In Platonov’s opinion, Peter’s reforms
merely accelerated previous processes, begun under his predecessors
and for this reason could not be regarded as a particularly
exceptional contribution to Russian development.
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This view,
interestingly enough, is corroborated in an observation made much
earlier, in the eighteenth century, by a no lesser figure than
Catherine the Great herself, who was one of Peter’s most celebrated
successors and admirers. She believed that: ‘The reform, undertaken
by Peter the Great, had been started by tsar Alexis. The latter had
already set about changing attire and many other customs...’
Many
analysts now adopt the line that Peter acted as a catalyst of the
Europeanization which had started before his time, by speeding up
policies already slowly under way. Under him Russia was undergoing,
in the main, a process of forced and greatly accelerated evolution
rather than of true revolution. Peter did not place his imprint on a
‘blank sheet’ as claimed by Chaadaev, but introduced changes which
were within the context of Muscovite developments.
At the same
time, many critics agree with the view of Klyuchevsky, that the pace
of his changes must have appeared revolutionary at the time:
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Started and carried through by the sovereign, the people’s
usual leader, the reforms were undertaken in conditions of
upheaval, almost of revolution, not because of their objects
but because of their methods, and by the impressions they
made on the nerves and imaginations of the people. Perhaps
it was more of a shock than a revolution, but the shock was
the unforeseen and unintended consequence of the reform.
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In other
words, Peter acted with such vigor and energy and enforced his
changes at such pace and volume that his actions certainly seemed
revolutionary to those who felt their immediate effects.
The number
of contrasting views on Peter can be multiplied infinitely. The
important thing to understand is that behind the controversy over
the nature of Peter’s Reform there is always present, explicitly or
implicitly, another fundamental argument: about the nature of the
pre-Petrine Russia. The controversy over Peter is a debate about the
Russian nation itself, about its roots, destiny and place in a wider
world. If Peter had inherited from the Muscovite tsars a nation of
barbarians, then his methods were justified and he deserves to be
called a Great Transformer. If, however, Peter tried to impose his
changes on a civilization which he did not understand and could not
appreciate, then Peter, automatically, becomes a tyrant and a
barbarian. It is precisely because the stakes in this debate are so
high, for it touches a very central issue of what Russia was and is,
Peter’s legacy is likely to remain for some time an issue not easily
amenable to a dispassionate, non-partisan enquiry.
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