Blood-Soaked

It has taken a while, but the memory industry is getting to work on Russian studies. As is only to be expected, the traumatic afterlife of the Second World War has drawn much attention.¹ Oral historians and anthropologists are asking their subjects to recall the Sputnik era or ‘late socialism’ or the Soviet collapse.² Meanwhile, a multi-authored French project has attempted to give the Pierre Nora treatment to Russian collective recall.³

Kevin Platt takes a welcome step back from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. His subject is the layers of representation that have accrued since the beginning of the nineteenth century to two notorious figures from tsarist history: Ivan the Terrible (1530–84) and Peter the Great (1672–1725). Accounts of these two rulers have varied wildly in their value judgements, but all have found it impossible to ignore two historiographical tropes. First, Ivan and Peter are recognized as having ruled at times of momentous transformation: as Platt frequently reminds us, they are quintessentially ‘liminal’ figures. Second, they are renowned for the violence they perpetrated – not only against whole groups of opponents but also against their own families (they were both responsible for the death of a son).

The overarching theme of ‘terror and greatness’ turns Ivan and Peter into a neat pairing. But it also worth noting differences between the two rulers, or at least between their historiographical legacies. Peter is the most commented-on figure in modern Russian history: the protagonist of numerous works of literature, the subject of an earlier full-length study along the lines of Platt’s, and the instigator of an intensive image-making industry even in his own lifetime.⁴ Although many of the modern treatments of Peter are shot through with ambivalence, no one has to try too hard to find the positives: victory over the Swedes, the founding of St Petersburg, transformation of the culture and institutions of the social elite. Ivan, by contrast, is a murky figure whose heyday did not arrive until the twentieth century.

Platt’s starting point is Nikolai Karamzin’s multi-volume History of the Russian State (1818–26), the foundation of modern Russian history-writing. In the early nineteenth century, Peter the Great was a mainstay of patriotic discourse. Karamzin’s innovation was to bring Ivan to prominence: the ninth volume of his History contains a shockingly bloody account of Ivan’s reign that immediately established that ruler’s reputation for sadism and oriental depravity. Although he did not get as far as Peter in his History, Karamzin’s attitude to that ruler (evident in unpublished writings) was far less celebratory than the official culture of the age. As an aristocratic conservative, Karamzin had plenty of reservations about the long-range cultural effects of Peter’s headlong drive to reform and innovate.

A decade after Karamzin, Nikolai Ustrialov, in his officially approved university textbook Russian History (first published 1837), produced a countervailing account that passed over Ivan’s violence in silence and extolled Peter’s achievement in transforming the ‘half-Asiatic life’ of Muscovite Russia into a European civilization. Yet, even as Ustrialov praised Peter, he established that ruler’s double-edged reputation for destructive transformation. Ustrialov’s positive assessment of the Petrine legacy required the drawing of distinctions between the healthy ‘basic elements of our nationality’ (autocracy, Orthodoxy, language, social structure), which were carried through by Peter into the modern age, and the negative ‘traces in Russia of Mongol rule’, which he eliminated. Other observers would find Peter’s destructive impulses to be less discriminating, or at the very least would show some appreciation of the human costs they entailed. Such ambivalence found an outlet in the burgeoning genre of historical fiction as well as in Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman (1833), Russian literature’s most famous work of the historical imagination. For Pushkin, violence and greatness could not be assigned to separate compartments: means and ends were in tragic...