Peter the Great (1672-1725) is today considered the most influential man in Russian history and the father of modern Russia. His almost manic obsession with Europe and everything Western shook the foundations of Russian identity. Before him, Russia was socially and culturally deeply rooted in the Orient, but Peter the Great uncompromisingly put Russia on the European map and in its military, political and economic power mix.
Incredibly capable, ambitious and visionary, he saw as a teenager that his country was drowning in a backwardness and stagnation from which only uncompromising modernisation could rescue it. He wanted to write a new chapter in Russian history, as unencumbered as possible by the legacy of the past, intellectually, militarily and culturally comparable to the European powers. Europe, which was entering the Age of Enlightenment, served as his model, and Russia as a laboratory for ambitious reforms.
He did everything for the realisation of his dream and for the glory and greatness of his country. He learned fourteen different professions and trades. By trying his hand as a shipwright, a carpenter, a sailor and a simple orderly, he set an example to the Russians and sent the message that it is ability and hard work, not blue blood and innate privilege, that are important for advancement and success. At the same time, he showed little interest in and understanding of the centuries-old customs and traditions of the little Russian man, the serf. Struggling with poverty, it was difficult for him to be impressed by his progressive reforms or to think about Russia’s place in the world.
For all the unrivalled achievements of this giant of history, his darker side cannot be ignored. He was an extremely ambivalent personality, but above all he knew no moderation and never questioned his autocratic status. He even had sadistic qualities. Not only did he tear off the beards of courtiers under the guise of wanting to modernise society, but he also enjoyed the most mundane depravities – including humiliating dwarfs, who often had to entertain him naked.
A born strategist with boundless ambition
Peter Alekseyevich Romanov, named after the Apostle Saint Peter, to whom he later dedicated his priceless work of art, the magical city of St Petersburg, was born in 1672. He was the third Tsar of the young Romanov dynasty, then only sixty years in power.
The initially peaceful upbringing at the Moscow court of the observant, tolerant and progressive couple, Tsar Alexei the First and his second wife Natalia, was soon shaken by dynastic intrigue with bloody consequences. After the death of his father and half-brother, the families of the two wives of the deceased Tsar Alexei (the Miloslavsky and Naryshkin families) clashed for supremacy at court, and Peter found himself caught in the crossfire.
But the tenacity of his character and the exceptional intellectual and physical abilities he showed even as a small boy meant that Peter eventually took the throne without too much difficulty. As a child, he reigned with his second half-brother, Ivan, under the regency first of his half-sister and later of his mother until the latter’s death in 1696. Then, as a mature and experienced young man, he reigned sovereignly on his own.
Peter’s father was already cautious about flirting with Western Europe, which was experiencing a real scientific and cultural renaissance at the time. It had successfully emerged from the grip of the Middle Ages, was rapidly enriching itself through “discovery” and the conquest of the world, and was entering the Age of Reason.
In Moscow, however, the leading nomenklatura consisted not only of the Tsar, but also of boyars, Russian nobles, the so-called Tsi, the elite military order and the Tsarist Guard, and above all the reactionary, authoritarian and traditionally oriented Orthodox Church. Hostile to modernisation and reforms that could threaten its primacy, the clergy declared any scientific progress to be the work of the devil, and fuelled superstition and irrational mysticism. The average Russian was completely under its influence and was therefore ignorant, uneducated and subject to religious obscurantism.
This was the Russian reality into which the future Tsar Peter the Great was born. The fear he felt in his childhood, witnessing the riots of the bloodthirsty Streltsevs, under whose swords many a head of his and his mother’s close confidants fell before his eyes, turned first into contempt, and later into a real hatred of the perverted Russian establishment.
A born leader and visionary, he thus began early on to imagine a different Russia and set himself the task of transforming and modernising the country and bringing it as close to Europe as possible. Many still accuse him of trying, without critical reflection, to artificially create a new Russia on the model of Western Europe. But such an interpretation of Peter the Great’s ambitions is only superficial. On the one hand, he wanted to ventilate Russian society and purge it of inhibiting factors of development; on the other, he drew inspiration from Europe and used only what he appreciated. The conceptual blueprint of the new Russia was based on its uniqueness.
As a boy and a young man, Tsarevich Peter liked to spend his time playing war games, and at the age of 15 he had a real army of about a thousand child soldiers to play with. Later, he formed them into military regiments to replace the untrustworthy scheming and rapacious Streltsy. With the help of foreign military experts, especially the Germans and the Dutch, he learned a great deal about real warfare through this kind of game. His love for it followed him throughout his life. Even when he finally got to see real combat, where he could demonstrate his skills, he still loved to stage simulations of battles, both on land and at sea.
One of Peter the Great’s greatest passions was the sea and ships, shipbuilding and the navy. But he was not just an amateur, he was too clever for that. He knew that without a navy, Russia would not be able to exercise its military and commercial power, and that his ambitions of a great Russia would remain a dream. But Russia at that time had virtually no navy at all. Apart from the port of Arkhangelsk on the White Sea in the north-west, it had no outlet to the open sea, and even there the water was frozen for much of the year. Peter successfully tackled this problem, and in his lifetime Russia had a respectable shipyard and admiralty in St Petersburg.
Escape from backwardness and the birth of a vision for the future
The stifling atmosphere of Moscow made him so depressed that during the period of his cohabitation with his otherwise incapable, blind and mentally handicapped half-brother Ivan, he preferred to stay in the quarters where foreigners lived. Government business and official duties were of little temptation to him in his teenage years, and he spent most of his time away from the Tsar’s court, between the Preobrazhensky mansion near Moscow and the foreign quarters, where he soaked up the cosmopolitan atmosphere and society.
Especially in the German-populated part of the city, he has embraced life with a vengeance in the company of well-rounded, fun-seeking Europeans. The revels he took part in often exceeded the limits of what was acceptable and degenerated into wild drunkenness, staggering and debauchery. According to some accounts, in his early teens Peter would drink half a litre of vodka and a bottle of sherry for breakfast, and continue with large quantities of wine during the day.
These are undoubtedly exaggerations, but they show the importance of alcohol in Russian society. Excessive drinking was widespread among all classes of the population, and many a foreigner, unaccustomed to the quantities of strong alcohol consumed, succumbed to its effects. For the Russians themselves, alcohol has always shortened their lives.
Peter was charismatic, attractive and extremely tall – about two metres and three centimetres tall.He was probably epileptic, but he may also have been hyperactive, as he found it difficult to stay still and was always doing several things at once. As the years passed, his neurological problems became more and more apparent and he twitched uncontrollably on the left side of his body.
He has always had great success with ladies from all walks of life. His long-time lover became the tongued and hot-blooded daughter of a German wine merchant, Anna Mons. He was surrounded by a multitude of loyal confidants, often as many as two hundred! Despite Peter’s enthusiasm for well-behaved Europeans, most of them were Russians. He chose them on the basis of ability and charisma, not on aristocratic origin, as had been the custom up to then. From then on, even people of humble origins could rise to the top.
This gave rise to the so-called “Peter’s Court”, a parody of the official Tsar’s court. Peter even gave his cronies formal ministerial and advisory titles. Notorious for its debauchery and drunken riots, Peter’s private court continued to function until his death, and word of it spread throughout Europe. Making a mockery of the traditional Moscow establishment was his main occupation. To dare to insult the Moscow elite so publicly was quite bold and risky, but the number of his confidants grew day by day.
Most of Peter’s loyal companions secured lifelong privileges and acquired abundant wealth, later mainly in the form of the lavish palaces of the new capital, St Petersburg. The modern oligarchs, so characteristic of today’s Russia, thus have a long tradition, deeply embedded in its social fabric.
Peter’s closest confidant and lifelong friend was Alexander Menshikov, who rose from a street vendor selling bread and pies to become the second most influential Russian of Peter’s era. He was the very prototype of the Russian crown capitalist, who acted solely for his own benefit and thoroughly exploited and even abused his position. But for Peter, loyalty was more important than integrity.
In spite of the fun, Peter preferred to engage in long intellectual debates on science, military technology, foreign policy, trade and the shipbuilding industry. There was no limit to his curiosity. He was also interested in how foreigners saw Russia and what they thought was wrong with it. They perceived it, like Peter, as socially numb, militarily ossified, economically stagnant. His respect for the West was growing and he had more and more ideas on how to lead Russia out of the despondency of the past. But first, he wanted to get to know up close a modern Europe on the threshold of enlightenment and reason.
Europe meets the carpenter Peter Mihajlov
Thus began one of the most fascinating and unique chapters of Peter’s life, the so-called Great Diplomatic Expedition. Peter set out on a real mission of exploration across Europe with a large entourage of 250 people, and decided to see at close quarters what made Europe different from Russia. Europe was at the height of the Age of Reason, when Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, Locke, Milton, Leibniz and others were famous. Europe was at the height of the Age of Reason, when Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, Locke, Milton, Leibniz and others were famous. While in Western Europe science, art and culture were on the rise and the church in decline, in Russia the Orthodox Church still had a dominant social influence.
Peter was the first Russian Tsar to travel abroad in peacetime. Officially, he set out to win European allies for the war against the Turks and to defend Russia’s borders on the northern shores of the Black Sea. He also wanted to recruit and bring to Russia foreign experts in military and naval affairs. The expedition lasted eighteen months between 1697 and 1698.
Since Peter had always been bothered by the excessive ceremonial pomp that should, according to protocol, accompany a diplomatic expedition of this kind with the presence of the Tsar, he decided to travel incognito. The leader of the expedition was his long-time companion, François Lefort, a Swiss mercenary who liked to look too deeply into his glass. He was known for hosting parties lasting several days and the merrymakers were ‘locked’ in his house for days together. This was not the best omen for the expedition, which in many ways turned into a debauched revelry.
Peter wanted to learn about the different trades in shipbuilding and military technology. So he first went to the Netherlands. He loved this country so much that he even took its flag as a model. The new Russian flag – it did not exist before – was white, blue, red, and the Dutch flag was red, white, blue. Every respectable country that had its own navy needed a flag, Peter reflected.
It was from the Dutch that he learnt most about shipbuilding, because during the Dutch Golden Age, the Netherlands was the world’s leading maritime power, alongside England, with an advanced navy and maritime technology. At the same time, it dominated world trade, notably through the Dutch East India Company. Between 1625 and 1700, the Netherlands built between 400 and 500 ships!
Peter quickly realised that without a formidable (naval) navy, Russia would never achieve superpower status, unable to defend its borders while remaining cut off from maritime trade routes. This realisation later influenced his geo-strategic decision in favour of building a new city with access to the open sea and good river links, St Petersburg.
He posed as Peter Mihajlov and got a job in the shipyards in the Netherlands as a simple carpenter, helping to build ships. But he was only partly successful, as rumours soon began to spread of a charismatic, at times wild and unadventurous emperor of the hitherto still mysterious eastern land. His height also made it difficult for him to blend in with the masses and his true identity was soon revealed. And as was the custom in many courts at that time, but especially in Russia, Peter was accompanied by a very unusual group of dwarfs. The giant Peter and his court jesters hardly went unnoticed.
He stayed longest in cosmopolitan Amsterdam, at the time of his visit the richest city in the world, with its magnificent government palaces, its interwoven river canals full of modern ships and boats, its bookshops with the latest scientific works and maps of the world’s seas, its hardware stores and various nautical paraphernalia, its goods from all over the world – porcelain, exotic fabrics, spices. Peter was in heaven.
When he wasn’t busy with an axe in a shipyard or drinks and women in pubs, he was on the hunt for the latest scientific inventions. He was interested in almost everything: architecture, printing, engraving, astronomy, botanical gardens, medicine. As for the latter, true to his pragmatic inclinations, he soon began to perform the simplest surgical procedures himself. He was particularly drawn to dentistry – members of his entourage quickly learned the consequences of complaining of a toothache. Peter would get out his tools, sit the sufferer in a chair and pull out his tooth without hesitation.
From rude manners to real debauchery
It also quickly became apparent that the Russian high society was ignorant of the manners and customs of the Western world. For example, at a dance in Hanover, the Russians exchanged the whalebones used for the popular women’s corsets for women’s ribs, and even Peter remarked, “German ladies have devilishly hard bones.”
After five months in the Netherlands, it was time to move. Destination England, the second largest maritime power next to the Netherlands, which also excelled in shipbuilding. And since its king at the time was also King of the Netherlands, William III. Oran, he officially invited Peter to visit.
Despite the catastrophic fire in London three decades earlier, the capital had a population of half a million and modern buildings of stone and brick were rising to replace the burnt-out medieval wooden shacks. Fascinated by the architecture, Peter watched with interest the transformation of the city.
His party was first housed at the expense of the English Crown in a new building complex in an elegant commercial estate. They indulged in luxury, shopping, concerts, theatres, and left behind havoc and unpaid bills. Peter visited military figures, statesmen, inventors and scientists, including Newton and Leibniz. Above all, he learned how to get the Russian Navy back on its feet.
But the most sophisticated traveller and guest was not, and the hosts scolded the archaic Russian habits of loud drinking and partying. In London, the gang finally crossed all the boundaries of decent behaviour and, during a stay with the eminent writer John Evelyn, they literally trashed his mansion. After their departure, the owner found artwork destroyed, garden beds trampled on, walls knocked down.
An often overlooked part of the journey was Peter’s flirtation with, and probably even membership of, Freemasonry. In London, it is said that he was initiated into the lodge by the Grand Master, Christopher Wren himself. Wren was a polymath, but above all a legendary architect who is credited with building more than fifty churches after the Great Fire of London and is also the creator of the famous St Paul’s Cathedral.
A large diplomatic expedition also visited Paris and Vienna, but had to cut short its journey because of rumours from Moscow that a renewed revolt by the Streltsev was imminent. Peter hurried home, where the rebellion was already under the control of the loyal Scottish General Patrick Gordon, another close ally and friend of Peter.
Peter’s vengeance on the rebellious Tsi was unspeakably cruel. In his book History of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, the leading Enlightenment thinker Voltaire, fascinated by this giant of history, wrote: “The leaders of the shot tse in, together with the officers and priests, were condemned to death; some were tied to large wheels and broken, two women were buried alive, more than two thousand steves were executed and hung on the walls of the city …”
The Prussian ambassador testified similarly. The Tsar is said to have ordered twenty insurgents to be brought before him. Then he drank shots of vodka and beheaded the first rebel who stood before him. He drank a second pint and hacked the next one to death. He continued like this until they were all dead. He had some of them slowly boiled over a fire, apparently enjoying the spectacle.
From cruelty to cultural revolution
When he did tsi, he immediately launched a cultural revolution. In line with everything he had learnt during his travels in Europe, he began to introduce reforms that would modernise Russia in every way. He brought with him more than eight hundred foreign experts and scholars in every conceivable field, recruits for the creation of a new Russia.
It introduced a compulsory western style of dress and banned long and cumbersome kaftans, long hair and long beards. Kaftans were a special traditional garment that also protected against the bitter Russian cold. But because Peter knew that such fashions were ridiculed in Europe, he banned them. The nobles were scandalised, the church was terrified.
He has also gone down in history as a fierce opponent of the excessively long, wavy Russian beards made compulsory by Ivan the Terrible in the mid-16th century. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church described beard shaving as a mortal sin, and the average devout Russian dared not shave his beard at all. It was only Peter’s father who allowed men to shave their beards, and Peter has always despised this symbol of Russian tradition.
At a celebration in honour of the return of the expedition, Peter himself cut the beards of the nobles, the so-called boyars, who were present. He was known for literally chasing them around the court, pulling, slicing and tearing their beards, often tearing off bits of skin along the way. From then on, the wearing of beards was only allowed on payment of a special beard tax.
His later reforms were much more socially progressive and thoughtful. These were introduced towards the end of his life, when, after the victory over Sweden, he no longer had to concentrate solely on military affairs.
He has been unwavering in the field of education and upbringing. He made education compulsory for all sons of the nobility, who could not even marry without a certificate of basic education (minimum five years). He began to send the most promising ones to study in Western Europe, so that, like him, they would have the opportunity to learn about the latest developments in all fields and then introduce them in Russia. He also founded the Russian Academy of Sciences and a number of vocational schools, artillery, engineering and medical.
Women were also slowly gaining a more prominent role in society. While their only education was learning manual skills, Peter met many women intellectuals in Europe. He was slowly becoming ashamed of the modest and simple Russian wives, who had been brought up to be second-class and obedient. His sisters and his first wife were also like this, and he later devoted himself to the thorough and extensive education of his daughters. Women were thus allowed to attend social events, to mix with men and to converse with them, even if they were unmarried. This was a revolution for Russian society, which literally shut girls out from the world from their early teens until marriage.
The bookshelves of the palaces also began to fill up, first with specialist Western literature, and soon with novels. Learning foreign languages was a necessity in the absence of Russian books, and Russians have maintained a very strong culture of reading and learning and love of foreign languages to this day.
It also aligns the Russian calendar with the European calendar. Until then, the Russians celebrated the New Year in September and counted the years from the supposed creation of the world; for example, 1699 was 7208.
Entrenched elites against progress
Peter travelled extensively, not only between Moscow and St Petersburg, but throughout the great empire. He was the first Russian Tsar who tried to get close to the people and was interested in their lifestyle, so different from that of the court. But he was also interested in how his reforms were succeeding. It was not unusual for him to spend the night unannounced in a simple village tavern, order a mug of beer, and set off early the next morning to the next village, where he gave orders on every aspect of the organisation of village life.
At home, despite all these attempts, his reforms met with great resistance and opposition to change, especially from the traditional Russian nobility, the boyars of the elite military order, the tsars and the Orthodox Church, Russia’s wealthiest and most influential institution. Fearing a loss of authority, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church did not support his reforms. Peter therefore took advantage of the disobedience of the clergy and, on the Patriarch’s death, appointed not a new Patriarch but a Synod of Bishops. This was a kind of episcopal assembly, but one that was less personal and therefore less influential. The patriarchate system was only reintroduced in 1917.
The next step towards reform was the introduction of religious tolerance. While Russians had to remain loyal to the Orthodox Church, Peter allowed foreigners of any faith to practice in order to attract as many able foreigners as possible to the country. He also disbanded the Estates – about 20,000 of them – and began a radical military reform.
One of the more far-reaching measures was undoubtedly the creation of a government on the model of the English, Dutch and Swedish governments. Colleges, or ministries of some kind, were created, with sectoral competences for the military, taxation, trade, education. He introduced a system of fourteen administrative grades for both civil and military administration. All nobles had to complete 25 years of national service, whether in the civil service, the army or the navy.
This measure was extremely unpopular and many people emigrated abroad or became priests to avoid this obligation. Everyone had to start their career at the lowest grade and had to prove themselves by work and ability in order to move up the ladder. Thus the principle of meritocracy applied, at least on paper.
Russia becomes a military superpower
Peter’s zeal for a complete transformation of Russian society was also reflected in the construction of the new capital, St Petersburg. As a symbol of the ‘window on Europe’, he geostrategically placed it at the exit to the open sea, in the Gulf of Finland, far away from Moscow. In this, his life’s project, he was also inspired by Western architectural models, and the plans for the city were drawn up and executed by eminent European architects, mainly Italian.
One of the first complex architectural feats was the construction of a harbour and a shipyard to house the Navy High Command. The Russian Navy, which Peter was literally obsessed with building, was thus able to flourish.
Before that, Russia had already built the foundations of its first navy, which managed to defeat the Turks at Azov on the Black Sea and thus put a stop to their invasions. This victory was the crowning glory of the second attempt, the first having failed because Russia had only a land army. Then, in 1696, the Imperial Russian Navy was created and, with the first programme, the Boyar Duma authorised the construction of 52 vessels.
Peter then made a truce with the Ottomans in 1700, having failed to win allies to fight them further during his great European journey. Europe, then on the brink of the Spanish War of Succession, had other priorities and concerns. In addition, the period at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries was also the period of the beginning of the Great Northern War (1700-1721) between Russia and its allies and Sweden. The armistice with the Turks allowed Peter to concentrate on the Baltic.
Sweden was then a powerful military power, threatening peace and stability in the region. Its new monarch, the young Charles XII, was, like Peter the Great, a military and political genius. Charles had already shown his military talent and leadership at the outset of the war, at the Battle of Narva in 1700, when the Swedish army defeated a Russian army four times as numerous. But Charles did not count on Peter’s endurance and by the time the Swedes turned their attention to Poland, Peter had trained the Russian army. In 1709, he dealt the Swedes a historic blow at the Battle of Poltava. Sweden lost its dominance of the Baltic to Russia, which slowly but steadily began to weave its web of influence across Eastern Europe.
As well as shipbuilding, Peter wanted to learn warfare as an ordinary soldier who, like others, could only rise to the top by proving his abilities. For example, in his first military regiments he was employed as a simple drummer. He became a Lieutenant-General only after the decisive Battle of Poltava.
Family vicissitudes and the last years of life
After the end of the Great Northern War, Peter slowly began to feel the effects of an exciting and often overworked lifestyle. Along with epilepsy, he suffered from frequent urinary infections and probably sexual diseases. In addition to governmental reforms, he devoted the last years of his life to succession concerns and the thoughtful organisation of his daughters’ marriages to influential European courts.
He was forced to marry his first wife, Yevdokiya Lopukina, and the marriage was unhappy. Yevdokiya was a typical Russian, brought up to be an unreflective, pious and generally unequal woman, as was the way of the time. But she bored Peter to death for that very reason, and as soon as he had done his duty as a husband and ruler and had provided a male heir, he completely stopped paying attention to her. Later, he forcibly removed her and sent her to a monastery so that he could marry the true love of his life.
He had two sons with Yevdokia, only one of whom survived. But until Peter practically put him in the other world, he was stealing his sleep. This was Alexei, deeply religious and thoughtful, but unambitious, drunk and suicidal – the very opposite of an ambitious father.
As Peter’s successor, Alexei was anything but a model Tsarevich. He disliked his father, probably mainly because he had taken his mother away from him at an early age, and he schemed against him with Peter’s other opponents. He even fled from his father to the Austrian court, but the Tsar brought him back by force. When the evidence of Alexei’s infidelity became too much, his father had him punished with forty strokes of a particularly cruel Russian whip (often further ‘decorated’ with numerous iron pegs). This punishment usually led to death. And even the weak Alexei succumbed to severe wounds.
The love of Peter’s life was Martha Elena Skavronska, a simple peasant girl from Lithuania, who had been orphaned by men from a young age. She then ended up as a maid for Peter’s greatest confidant, Alexander Menshnikov. Peter fell in love at first sight with this exuberant, playful and loving girl and they became inseparable. She took the Orthodox name Catherine and officially married Peter in 1712, thus becoming Tsarina. They were survived by only two daughters out of a total of twelve children. Daughter Elizabeth later became Tsarina.
The role that Catherine I played in Peter’s life was also indicative of the changed role of women in general. While there are many criticisms of Peter, he treated capable women equally and opened the door to future Russian tsars, including Catherine the Great, by deciding on the succession. He also issued a law which allowed Russian tsars to choose their own successor. Sources disagree on his choice – some say he chose his daughter Anna, others Catherine, others no one.
But Catherine wielded great influence in elite circles, especially in military circles, and became the first Russian tsarina in her own right. This was just the latest in a series of upheavals in traditional Russian society during Peter the Great’s reign. Who would have thought a decade before that a woman, and a foreigner of humble origins at that, would take the throne of the new Russian empire? Catherine continued Peter’s reforms, but left the decisions mostly to an old acquaintance, Menshikov, in whose household she had served as a teenage girl. She died two years after Peter, in 1727.
A man of controversial qualities or just a man of his times?
Peter the Great is most often spoken of in superlatives – his achievements in all fields were unparalleled. But there was also a dark side to his personality, often glossed over by historical sources in the spirit of glorifying his greatness. He reigned in a generally harsh period when human life and humanity were of little value. But he surpassed in many ways the brutality of even such predecessors as, for example, the notorious Ivan the Terrible.
He forced his followers to play perverted games, they had to fight each other, skate on ice on their naked buttocks, drink gallons of strong alcohol, and were often forced to drink themselves to death. He enjoyed watching the burning buildings and was generally fascinated by fire and explosions. He used to set off spectacular fireworks.
Once, during a New Year’s Eve celebration, he forced the fattest noblemen to sledge across the cracks of an icy river; several fell into the freezing water and drowned. According to a Russian diplomat, “Peter and his friends pushed a burning candle up Prince Volkonsky’s backside, and then they prayed around it. People were smeared with tar and then made to stand on their heads.” Once, a bellows was used to pump air into someone’s colon, causing the poor man’s instant death.
All this he could afford to do as a true autocrat with unlimited power and authority. In 1721, he declared Russia an empire and made himself Grand Emperor in the style of the ancient Romans.
For all the advanced scientific, social and cultural ideas he imported from Europe, he never questioned the self-evidence of his privileges. Meanwhile, enlightened Europe often saw him as an unlived relic of a distant past in which Russia was still lost.
