Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths by Kevin M. F. Platt (review)

Speaking with director Sergei Eisenstein and actor Nikolai Cherkasov in 1947, Stalin praised Ivan the Terrible’s “wisdom” and “insistence on national principles,” lamenting only that the dread tsar did not “completely rub out” some of the larger noble families. He added that Peter I was “also a great sovereign, but he was too liberal in his relationship to foreigners” (P. 176). That the world’s most powerful communist came to identify with his monarchical fore-bears is deeply ironic. But it comes as no surprise to historians of Russia and the Soviet Union, as many scholars have mapped the shifting interpretations of Russian history’s most famous “velikii” and infamous “groznyi,” greatly expanding our understanding of Ivan and Peter’s place in Russian history and culture in the process.¹

Kevin Platt’s Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths builds on this existing work, while also making a number of novel contributions. The book’s major argument can be summarized as follows. Studying representations of Ivan IV and Peter I alongside one another makes sense because Ivan and Peter are “the most prominent examples drawn from the deep national past of an important category in Russian historical thought: the ruler who is alternately lionized for his heroic, great achievements and condemned for his extraordinary violence and despotism” (P. 2). Platt argues that the changing, accretive representations of these pivotal tsars during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have come to comprise “myths” that have “illustrated and explained collective selfhood in Russia” by providing a “persistent symbolic reserve, shaping and serving the needs of Russian political and cultural life” (Pp. 2–3). In particular, he emphasizes the ways in which representations of Ivan and Peter’s reigns took shape not merely as interpretations of past events, but emerged within – and were accordingly shaped by and in response to – a proliferating ecosystem of historiographical, literary, visual, and dramatic interpretations. As his title suggests, the relationship between “terror” and “greatness” has remained central to these representations: the “political and cultural function of historical ‘greatness’ in modern Russia,” he writes, “has been, at base, founded on the experience, disavowal, and reinscription of ‘terror’” (Pp. 2–3).

Drawing on a range of anthropological scholarship, Platt emphasizes the “liminal potential” of Ivan and Peter’s reigns to shape discussions of “collective identification.” Considerations of identity and belonging in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, given the diversity of subject populations, shifting state ideologies, and the growth of a literate public, have required a “past that was as multivalent as the political contexts that it would be made to serve.” Both Ivan and Peter, Platt notes, “straddle the physical and symbolic borders of nation and empire, of the modern and of political belonging,” and have thus been “in unique fashion suited as mythic forebears of a community that positioned itself as never only Russian, not fully or only modern, and never completely settled politically” (P. 8).

Terror and Greatness proceeds chronologically, beginning with the early nineteenth century and ending with the Stalin period. Each of the six chapters has a single-word title that encapsulates its argument. Chapter 1, “Liminality,” explains how Ivan and Peter during the first half of the nineteenth century came to occupy their roles as “touchstones in Russian thought about the relationship between rulers and ruled, between the exercise of coercive power and the content of the collective being, and between traumatic historical experience and political greatness” (P. 14). At the same time that history was taking on a crucial role in defining national identities across Europe, in Russia, “rather than laboring to set the national being on historical foundations,” history served as a “tool to negotiate the problematic interrelationship between imperial and national frames of reference and between dynastic and national principles of political life” (P. 14). In this endeavor, Ivan and Peter...