Stones on the Prairie: Acculturation in Texas

The Roman Empire in the Era of Peter the Great

Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert O. Crummey. Chester S. L. Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2008, 155–72.       The Roman Empire in the Era of Peter the Great Paul Bushkovitch In  the  reign  of  Peter  the  Great  Russian  conceptions  of  the  nature  of  monarchi-­‐‑ cal  rule  and  the  manner  of  presentation  of  the  tsar  to  the  elite  and  the  com-­‐‑ mon  people  changed  fundamentally.  The  tsar  had  been  a  component  in  a  fun-­‐‑ damentally  religious  view  of  the  world.  Russians  had  not  asked:  is  he  bound   by  law?  Is  he  absolute?  What  is  sovereignty  and  what  is  his  part  in  it?  Should   the   state   be   a   monarchy?   These   are   the   terms   of   Western   political   thought,   and  most  of  them  could  not  even  be  expressed  in  Russian  before  the  end  of   the   17th   century.   The   Russians   who   compiled   the   known   texts   that   reflect   their  understanding  of  the  tsar  had  asked  one  question:  is  the  tsar  a  good  and   faithful  Orthodox  Christian?  Or  does  he  violate  God’s  commandments?  Peter   changed  all  that,  and  by  the  end  of  his  reign  all  the  “Western”  questions  could   be  formulated  and  various  answers  given,  at  least  among  the  ruling  elite  and   a  small  number  of  educated  gentry.1   The  new  idea  of  the  state  and  the  monarch  implied  new  forms  of  presen-­‐‑ tation  of  the  ruler,  and  as  Russia  was  now  undergoing  what  we  call  “Western-­‐‑ ization,”  there  were  a  number  of  sets  of  images  available  in  Europe.  The  older   forms  of  presentation,  the  rituals  of  the  court,  the  pilgrimages,  and  the  events   of  the  “private”  life  of  the  tsar  took  place  in  a  religious  framework.  In  the  new   secular  and  European  world,  one  of  the  most  obvious  possibilities  was  to  pre-­‐‑ sent  the  monarch  in  Roman  terms  by  referring  to  the  history  of  the  Roman                                                                                                                             1  Daniel   Rowland,   “The   Problem   of   Advice   in   Muscovite   Tales   about   the   Time   of   Troubles,”  Russian  History  6:  2  (1979):  259–83;  idem,  “Did  Muscovite  Literary  Ideology   Place  Limits  on  the  Power  of  the  Tsar  (1540’s–1660’s),”  Russian  Review  49  (1990):  125– 55;   idem,   “Moscow—the   Third   Rome   or   the   New   Israel?”   Russian   Review   55   (1996):   591–614;   Joel   Raba,   “Moscow—the   Third   Rome   or   the   New   Jerusalem,”   Forschungen   zur  osteuropäischen  Geschichte  50  (1995):  297–308;  Robert  O.  Crummey,  “Court  Specta-­‐‑ cles  in  Seventeenth-­‐‑Century  Russia:  Illusion  and  Reality,”  in  Essays  in  Honor  of  A.  A.   Zimin,   ed.   Daniel   Waugh   (Columbus,   OH:   Slavica,   1985),   130–58;   Paul   Bushkovitch,   “The  Epiphany  Ceremony  of  the  Russian  Court  in  the  Sixteenth  and  Seventeenth  Cen-­‐‑ turies,”  Russian  Review  49  (1990):  1–17.  On  political  ideas  in  Peter’s  time,  see,  among   others,  Georgii  Gurvich,  “’Pravda  voli  monarshei’  Feofana  Prokopovicha  i  ee  zapad-­‐‑ noevropeiskie  istochniki,”  Uchenye  zapiski  imp.  Iur’evskogo  universiteta  11  (1915);  Lind-­‐‑ sey   Hughes,   Russia   in   the   Age   of   Peter   the   Great   (New   Haven:   Yale   University   Press,   1998),  248–97,  378–89;  James  Cracraft,  The  Petrine  Revolution  in  Russian  Culture  (Cam-­‐‑ bridge,  MA:  Harvard  University  Press,  2004),  181–92.   156 PAUL BUSHKOVITCH emperors,  world-­‐‑conquerors  (it  seemed),  enactors  of  law  codes,  and  endlessly   glorious   and   powerful.   For   the   Europeans,   Rome   was   a   cliché.   European   noblemen  kept  whole  galleries  of  real  and  imaginary  portraits  of  Roman  em-­‐‑ perors,  and  visual  images  derived  from  Rome,  like  the  many  statues  of  Louis   XIV  in  Roman  armor  on  horseback,  were  commonplace.  One  would  think  that   Peter   would   avail   himself   of   this   possibility,   and   some   historians   have   claimed  that  he  did.  Richard  Wortman  wrote  of  the  “shift  from  a  Byzantine  to   a  Roman  imperial  model.”  Some  Russian  historians  of  culture  have  preferred   either  to  resurrect  the  Third  Rome  (Lotman  and  Uspenskii)  or  to  assert  that   Peter’s  model  was  Christian  Rome  (Zhivov).  Lindsey  Hughes  described  the   Romanization   of   the   tsar’s   image,   though   she   also   noted   the   European   Ba-­‐‑ roque  elements  in  the  new  image.2     Two  aspects  of  Peter’s  presentation  of  monarchy  seem  to  give  support  to   a  Roman  model.  One  is  the  triumphal  processions  that  marked  his  victories   and  the  other  is  the  adoption  of  the  new  title,  imperator,  in  1721.  The  proces-­‐‑ sions  with  their  triumphal  arches  are  part  of  the  visual  culture  of  Peter’s  state,   and  are  certainly  relevant  to  the  examination  of  Roman  themes.  They  have  re-­‐‑ cently  been  the  object  of  considerable  attention  on  the  part  of  Russian  art  his-­‐‑ torians,  who  have  found  little  Roman  in  them  beyond  the...