A Short History of Europe by Simon Jenkins

Author:Simon Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241352533
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

Peter the Great

As Sweden subsided, Russia rose. Peter had inherited a country that was still in the Middle Ages. It was ruled by the tsar through regional barons or boyars, under whom Cossacks owned and farmed much of the land. Beneath them was a population of some twenty million serfs. Education was virtually non-existent and women lived in seclusion. The tsar ruled as an autocrat, with no parliament or civil rights. Men wore long beards and dressed traditionally in coats down to the ground.

Peter, like Vladimir in the tenth and eleventh centuries and Ivan in the sixteenth, was eager to bring his country into what he saw as the European mainstream. In 1697, before the Swedish war, he had set out on a year-long ‘grand embassy’, ostensibly incognito, to Amsterdam, Dresden, Vienna, London and Oxford. He studied everything from military strategy to city planning and art history. On his return, he imitated Constantine and planned a new capital at St Petersburg. It was designed by Swiss and French architects in the classical style, built on the labour, and reputedly the corpses, of Russian peasants and Swedish prisoners-of-war. It was formally founded in 1703 and its white palaces, gilded churches, squares and canals made it one of the handsomest cities in Europe. It remains so to this day.

Peter established a modern civil service, a reformed Orthodox church, a school system and a Russian navy. He abolished the boyars’ council or duma, and replaced it with a twelve-man senate and a new aristocracy, based on service to the state. Peter removed eight letters from the Russian alphabet, and ordered males to shave and wear shorter western-style jackets. For all that, Peter remained Russian to the core. He was brash, high-living, persistently drunk and unable to brook opposition or contradiction, a Sun King of the steppe. He could adapt his country to western innovation, but he was immune to political reform. He opened Russia’s door on Europe’s emerging intellectual enlightenment, but never stepped through it.

In foreign policy was there a sort of symmetry between Peter’s Russia and Walpole’s Britain. Both sat on the continent’s geographical extremities, and both viewed its conflicts with some detachment. But there the similarity ended. Britain’s outlook was maritime, global and commercial. It behaved as if it was supreme over every ship at sea. Russia’s ambitions, on the other hand, were land-based, with half its gaze towards the vast territories of Asia and the riches of the Orient. Between these two pillars of what was to become a global imperialism lay a new Europe.

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