To the Editors

Ernest Zitser is to be commended for his excellent review essay ("Post-Soviet Peter," Kritika 6, 2 [2005]: 375–92) on recent work by Russian historians on "Peter the Great and all things Petrine" (376). My attention (as a very "post-Petrine" historian and observer of post-Soviet Russia) was especially drawn to the concluding pages with the picture and discussion of Mikhail Shemiakin's statue of Peter (391–92). It holds for me a special attraction; and I have made a point, during my frequent post-Soviet trips to St. Petersburg, of returning regularly to the site. The statue impresses me particularly by its presentation of the tsar, seated in a simple armchair, reduced to human proportions (not in my opinion an "ill-formed freak," as Lindsay Hughes would have it), with his head (copied from the death mask of Peter) virtually at the eye level of visitors. It is the very antithesis of Falconet's lofty, deified image (à la Louis XIV) in Decembrist Square.

Most intriguing to me over the past decade has been the gradual appropriation of the statue by Russian visitors. Foreign tourists, uncomprehending or uninterested, wander by without stopping on their way to the Peter and Paul Cathedral. But Russians have made Shemiakin's Peter one of their own, crowding around the statue and clearly enjoying this view of their tsar brought down from his pedestal to be accessible to ordinary folk. Children were the first to clamber onto his lap to have their picture taken en famille. Now grownups are doing the same. Parts of the statue (the elongated fingers in particular) have been rubbed so frequently that they have acquired a noticeable sheen. If this demonstration of familiarity is any measure of popular attitudes toward Russia's venerable hero, Zitser's forecast of a "post-modern Peter" is prescient even with regard to ordinary Russians. To me, that is a reassuring development, particularly when set against President Putin's recent efforts at a neo-Soviet revival of (in Zitser's well-chosen words) "the old, officially sanctioned moral and political order" (392). Let us hope Russian historians continue on the same path as their public.