the image of peter the great in russian history and thought.by nicholas v. riasanovsky

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The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought. by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky Review by: Marc Raeff Slavic Review, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 538-540 Published by: Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2498022 . Accessed: 24/06/2014 01:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.59 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 01:04:22 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought. by Nicholas V. RiasanovskyReview by: Marc RaeffSlavic Review, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 538-540Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2498022 .

Accessed: 24/06/2014 01:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.59 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 01:04:22 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

538 Slavic Review

In addition, Majeska is sensitive to the dynamics of tour guides and tourists and how it affects the communication of local lore between them. He takes advantage of the "amaz- ing continuity of land use" in Constantinople-Istanbul to inform his investigation with observations made in situ.

On the basis of more recent research Majeska would probably wish to moderate his paeans to Novgorodian autonomy from the Tatars and uniqueness as an international commercial center in medieval Russia. Novgorod was neither as immune from the Horde nor as atypical in its economic activities as previously supposed. The Novgorodian origin of three of these five texts strikes me as less significant than one might think at first glance. I do not believe Novgorodians were more likely than others to visit Constanti- nople, and there is nothing especially "Novgorodian" in their reactions to the city. To be sure, the sixth Russian narrative, of a pilgrimage to Constantinople on the eve of its sack by the Crusaders in 1204, was also written by a Novgorodian, Anthony. Majeska promises us a parallel volume on that text.

The book succeeds in taking the reader into the religious world of medieval Ortho- doxy at street level. It is a masterful tour conducted by a masterful guide. Majeska has written a fitting tribute to the memory of his academic mentor, the late George Soulis, to whom the volume is dedicated. Higher praise than that one cannot give this fine study.

CHARLES J. HALPERIN Indianapolis, Indiana

THE IMAGE OF PETER THE GREAT IN RUSSIAN HISTORY AND THOUGHT By Nicholas V Riasanovsky. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. ix, 331 pp. Illustrations. $29.95.

Nicholas Riasanovsky's distinguished and productive scholarly career has focused on the history of Russian nationalism. He started out with a critique of the Normanist origins of Rus' (and by extension of Russia) and devoted his first major monographs to Slavophilism and "Official Nationality." Aside from occasional forays into other domains, the mid- nineteenth-century turning point or caesura in modern Russian culture and national con- sciousness has fascinated him ever since. Naturally, the figure and reign of Peter the Great loomed large in this story. What Aleksandr Kizevetter in his "O P. N. Miliukove-isto- rike" (P. N. Miliukov, Sbornik materialov po chestvovaniiu ego semidesiatiletiia 1859-1929, Paris, 1929) has said about Peter's role in Russian historiography may also be applied to any and all manifestations of Russian culture: "As in France every new stage in the development of historical thought has found expression in a revision of the history of the great French Revolution, so in Russia a similar function, a litmus test so to say, was performed by . .. an historian's understanding of the reforms of Peter." This book is the result of Riasanovsky's wide-ranging and thorough readings of historical and literary sources.

In writing the history of the image of Peter I reflected in the words of writers, think- ers, and historians, Riasanovsky has limited himself to the images created by Russians inside Russia from 1700 to the present (this explains the omission not only of contributions by foreigners, but also-and more questionably to my mind-of much of the work of Russians abroad, especially of emigre writers and scholars in the 1920s and 1930s). The book is divided into four chapters following Riasanovsky's periodization of Russian in- tellectual history (as previously suggested in his A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public, 1801-1855 [Oxford, 1976]): the Enlightenment from 1700 to 1826, the age of Idealistic philosophy and Romanticism (from 1826 to 1860), the Age of Realism and Scholarship (from 1860 to 1917), and the Soviet period.

The first two chapters are the most interesting and suggestive. Riasanovsky is quite clearly in his element here, although I do not always agree with some of his conceptual

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Reviews 539

categories and apodictic characterizations of the intellectual and cultural scene. In Ria- sanovsky's opinion Russia's culture throughout the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century was dominated by the rationalism and optimistic belief in progress of the European Enlightenment. In that century Peter I was cast in the image of the titanic moving and guiding spirit that forced Russia onto the path of European education and civilization. To be sure, there were some dissenting and qualifying voices (for example, Mikhail Shcherbatov) that reminded contemporaries of the existence in pre-Petrine times of a Russian history and culture. This reminder served as a point of departure in the next period for the Slavophiles' negative assessment of the role played by the first emperor. Riasanovsky's first chapter is particularly valuable because of its summary of the opinions expressed by litt6rateurs and extensive quotations from their prose and poetry, with Pushkin, naturally, taking first place.

Riasanovsky's second period is marked by the breakdown of the consensus rooted in rationalism and enlightenment under the impact of idealism and romantic ideas. The intellectual pluralism that has prevailed since then ranges from chauvinistic adulation to decisive condemnation by radicals and socialists. In the most interesting and successful pages in the book, Riasanovsky discusses the role of Petr Chaadaev, who provided the impetus for and personified this breaking apart of the image of Peter the Great. Like the first chapter, the second has a wealth of quotations from and references to much forgotten and underrated literature; they throw much needed light on the formation and evolution of a Russian cultural identity as reflected in images of Peter I. I would have wished for a more searchingly critical analysis of the implication these images had for Russia's cultural tradition-mais d chaque jour suffit sa peine.

More serious problems, however, arise when Riasanovsky turns his attention to the remaining two periods. Although he warns the reader that his book is not "a historio- graphical essay meant to delineate the progressive development of our knowledge of the Petrine period and the present state of that knowledge," the second half deals almost exclusively with historians. It is true that scholarly history (called "scientific" in Soviet parlance) came into its own in the second half of the nineteenth century and effectively shaped the "images" of Peter the Great and Russia's past that became part and parcel of Russian general education. Yet, to do justice to these scholarly contributions it is not enough to summarize (albeit with copious quotations) the historians' interpretations; it is necessary to analyze their specific philosophic and methodological concerns, as well as the intellectual ambience in which they were active. Riasanovsky is content to attach general and clich6 "labels" to the scholarly books and articles he cites, leaving it to the reader to fill in or elaborate their implications.

Admittedly, after 1860 there is no one comparable to Pushkin, and the two greatest novelists, Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, paid relatively little attention to Peter I and his time. Russia entered a period of greater specialization and division of intellectual labor, so that there was no longer a place for a polymath of Lomonosov's type. Nevertheless, the treat- ment given to the writers and thinkers of the Silver Age appears somewhat unsatisfactory. Names are mentioned (Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Solov'ev, Andrei Belyi, Dmitrii Me- rezhkovskii, for instance), but their contribution to the image of Peter I and his time is not given the searching attention it deserves. It would have been necessary, perhaps, to broaden the framework to include the "image" not only of the first emperor and his reign but also of the eighteenth century or the entire imperial-St. Petersburg-period. The author has chosen not to do this and as a result has sharply limited the import of his study. Similarly, the Soviet period is treated in too summary a fashion, from the outside, as it were; the significant features of Soviet cultural life are avoided and essential meth- odological aspects left out of consideration. By contrast, Riasanovsky felicitously char- acterizes contemporary Soviet images of Peter I's reign as "bi-polar," stressing both the negative consequences for the people and positive gains for the state.

Riasanovsky's book is an invaluble source and reference tool that will do yeoman

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540 Slavic Review

service for all historians concerned with the role played by the image of Peter I in the intellectual history of Russia.

MARC RAEFF Columbia University

PROVINCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN RUSSIA: CATHERINE II AND JACOB SIE- VERS. By Robert E. Jones. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984. xi, 255 pp. Maps. Tables. $32.00.

In seven concise chapters Robert E. Jones discusses concepts of development and their adaptation to Russia in the mid-eighteenth century, the new regime of Empress Catherine II, the new governor and later governor-general of Novgorod guberniia (Jacob Sievers, 1764-81), socioeconomic circumstances in the huge territory, the reorganization and development of northwestern Russia from 1762 to 1796, and some obstacles to pro- vincial development. Throughout these chapters the author focuses upon the evolving interrelationships between Catherine's enlightened policies, Sievers's role in her govern- ment, and the conditions in Novgorod guberniia. His perspective is revisionist in seeking to describe and to analyze these interrelationships in the context of the time, with occa- sional comparisons to developments in Europe, Great Britain, and North America. He utilizes a good many unpublished sources from Soviet archives-mainly central govern- ment materials and reports from Sievers and his successors-along with printed docu- ments, memoirs, and secondary sources in several languages to supplement his heavy reliance upon the older standard biography-memoir by Karl Blum (4 vols., 1857).

His attitude toward Catherine and Sievers is quite favorable, though not uncritical. Both are depicted as well-educated, well-informed, hardworking, pragmatic administra- tors sincerely seeking to promote prosperity, productivity, and happiness as these matters were understood during the last third of the century. Indeed, Jones contends that Cath- erine and Sievers largely pioneered the prodigious task of reforming provincial Russia. Their initial efforts in the 1760s were limited and piecemeal, but the task assumed higher priority and wider implementation through the Guberniia Reform of 1775. Even then, however, the results proved disappointingly meager to Sievers, whose resignation in 1781 was due largely to his perception that the empress had decided to sacrifice provincial development in northwestern Russia in favor of imperial conquest and rapid colonization of the southern steppes. Yet Jones sensibly notes the less promising prospects in the northwest and the precedents set by Peter the Great and Frederick the Great in state- building through military expansion. He demonstrates, moreover, the tremendous prac- tical obstacles to development: the weakness of the state's administrative machinery in the provinces, the scattered population, the low level of economic activity, and the absence of basic information such as maps and statistics. Because of the importance of water routes through Novgorod guberniia, Jones follows Sievers's efforts to improve the canal network, an endeavor completed only in the early nineteenth century. He also presents a curious portrait (but no prints) of Sievers including a brief account of his explosive divorce, which is portrayed as a product of the governor's workaholic ways.

Although the prose is generally incisive, the book is not faultless in substance or style. Minor factual errors include misdating Elizabeth's death and Peter III's (not Peter II's) accession, placing Princess Dashkova instead of her husband on the city-plan- ning commission, incorrectly computing totals in tables 2 and 6, and garbling an important quotation (p. 106) in which the incomprehensible sachal should be translated as redemp- tion (see Roger Bartlett's recent article in Jahrbucher far Geschichte Osteuropas, 32 [1984]: 19). Many misspellings occur in English and in Russian; some names are mangled; no pages are cited for several articles in the notes and bibliography; relevant dissertations

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