Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725 (review)

Bushkovitch's lively study is not a biography of Peter the Great. Instead, it provides a "narrative of the politics of Peter's time" that will "elucidate the informal structures of power in the Russian state" (1). Bushkovitch accomplishes the extraordinary feat of charting the ins and outs of the Petrine elite and manages to render his detailed account in a readable and accessible way.

Methodologically, Bushkovitch's approach is straightforward. Putting his tremendous linguistic talents to work, he draws on the reports of foreign envoys, primarily from the Scandinavian states and the Holy Roman Empire, to chart the month-by-month alterations in the fortunes of various court players. If he has a methodological contribution to make, it is his willingness to take court gossip seriously and to mine it for evidence of informed contemporary perceptions of relations among the elite.

The book reaches several conclusions. First, it identifies a pattern in the dizzying circulation of actors at court. During the reign of Fedor, Peter's half-brother, and the complicated years of Peter's minority, court factions vied fiercely for control, but the players involved all came from the traditional boyar and princely elite. Peter came into his own in 1689, and he turned increasingly to an inner circle of favorites, that is, parvenus and foreigners. When his favorites, particularly Aleksandr Menshikov, thoroughly discredited themselves through arrogant and corrupt behavior, Peter turned back to a more aristocratic set. These boyars and princes, in turn, lost the monarch's favor when their support for Tsarevich Aleksei, his rebellious son, came to light between 1715 and 1718. The "Affair of the Tsarevich" ended grimly in the death of the tsarevich and a spate of executions and banishments of his aristocratic supporters. In the final period of his reign, Peter sought a balance between aristocrats and favorites. Each group found a base for its activities in the newly developing institutions of government.

Reliance on foreigners' accounts for his primary evidence pushes Bushkovitch to pay attention to foreign policy, an aspect of court politics that has often been overlooked in other histories of the reign. Most recent studies have explained court factions as the product of family and clan loyalties, but Bushkovitch asserts that genuine issues of policy divided various groups. This reintroduction of political divisions again surfaces in his rereading of the affair of Tsarevich. Most studies of the lethal clash between father and son have focused on the psychological tensions that doomed the two to tragedy. Bushkovitch, by contrast, argues that Peter's treatment of his son derived as much from politics and principle as from personal antipathy. Bushkovitch lends urgency to this corrective when he charges that the standard publication of the sources on the affair deliberately suppressed all political content, thus distorting the historical record.

Bushkovitch shows that foreigners constantly reported rumors circulating about movements to replace the unpopular Peter with one or another of his leading boyars or generals. The insistent recurrence and specificity of such rumors is startling in a political culture ostensibly wedded to tsarist legitimacy. This finding strengthens Bushkovitch's overall argument that politics cannot be omitted from our understanding of late Muscovite politics. The idea that Russians actively imagined toppling their tsar and replacing him with the nobleman of their choice challenges the direction in which Muscovite history has been going for the past few decades. It suggests that blanket application of anthropological models of kinship and clan to the politics of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century may obscure as much as it enlightens.