Art History Today

Petersburg Baroque: Slides

Slides

1) Paul Delaroche, Peter the Great, oil on canvas, oil on canvas, 130.6 × 97 cm, Kuntshalle, Hamburg.

2) Map of Russia under Peter the Great.

3) Map of modern Russia, Eurasia & Europe.

4) C. B. Rastrelli, detail from bronze bust showing Peter I as Pygmalion carving the image of New Russia in Galatea, Hermitage Museum, Russia.

5) Sergey Ivanov, The Streltsy, oil on canvas, Russian Historical Museum, Moscow.

6) Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Peter I (the Great), 1697, oil on canvas, 241.2 x 145.4 cm, Royal Collection.

7) Sir Godfrey Kneller, His Excellency Peter John (Ivanovich) Potemkin, Ambassador, 1682, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

8) Vasily Ivanovich Surikov, "The Morning of the Streltsy Execution" after their failed uprising in 1698, 1881, oil on canvas, 223 x 383,5, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

9) Ilya Repin, Grand Duchess Sofia at the Novodevichy Convent (1698). Oil on canvas. 201.8 × 145.3 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

10) V. I. Surikov, Boyarynya Morozova (?- 1675), 1884-1887, oil on canvas, 304 x 587.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

11) Ivan Saltanov, Icon depicting The Cross of Kiy, a replica of the True Cross with holy relics commissioned by Nikon, Orthodox patriarch of Moscow, in 1656. On the left are the images of Saint Emperor Constantine the Great, Tsar Alexey Mikhaylovich and Patriarch Nikon. To the right: Saint Empress Helena and Tsarina Maria Ilyinichna.

12) Aerial view of St Petersburg from the top of St Isaac’s Cathedral.

13) Alexandre Benoit, Peter the Great Meditating the Idea of Building St Petersburg at the Shore of the Baltic Sea, 1916, oil on canvas, Hermitage, St Petersburg.

14) Valentin Serov, Peter I, 1907, oil on canvas, 68.5 х 88 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

15) Map of St Petersburg, 1744, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

16) A Schoonebeck, The Taking of Azov in 1696, etching, inscriptions in Russian and Latin.

17) Map of Black Sea area with Sea of Azov.

18) Peter I, (with corrections by Schoonebeck) Allegory of the Russian Victory over the Turks at Azov in 1696, 1698, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

19) J. M. Nattier, Tsaritsa Catherine Alekseeva (wife of Peter I), later Empress Catherine I, oil on canvas, 142.5 x 110 cm, Hermitage, St Petersburg.

20) J. M. Nattier, Peter the Great, 1717, oil on canvas, 56 x 43 cm, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

21) Aert de Gelder, Peter the Great, 1717?, oil on canvas, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

22) Louis Caravaque, Portrait of Peter the Great, 1716, oil on canvas, location unknown.

23) Nikolei Ge, Peter I interrogating his son Alexei, 1871, oil on canvas, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

24) C. B. Rastrelli, Bust of Peter the Great, 1723, cast bronze with details chased in low relief, Hermitage, St Petersburg.

25) Marie-Anne Collott, Head of Peter the Great, c. 1773, gypsum, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

26) George Gsell, Count Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy, oil on canvas, location unknown.

27) Map of modern Russia, Eurasia & Europe.

28) A. P. Losenko, Portrait of Count Shuvalov, c. 1760, oil on canvas, Russian Historical Museum, St Petersburg.

29) A.P. Losenko, Vladimir and Rogneda, 1770, oil on canvas, Russian Historical Museum, St Petersburg.

30) Ivan Nikitin, Portrait of Count G.I.Golovkin, c. 1720, oil on canvas, oil on canvas, 90.9 x 73.4, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

31) Andrei Matveev, Self-Portrait with his Wife, 1729, oil on canvas, 75.5 x 90.5 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

32) Ivan Yakovlevich Vishnyakov, Sarah Fermor, 1749, oil on canvas, Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

33) Aleksey Antropov, Self-Portrait with his Son and a Portrait of his Wife, 1784, oil on canvas, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

34) Portrait of Unknown woman, 1760s, oil on canvas, 53 x 43,8 (oval), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

35) Aleksey Antropov, Portrait of M. A. Ruminatseva, 1764, oil on canvas, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

36) F Ia Alekseev, View of the Winter Palace Embankment, St Petersburg, 1790s, oil on canvas, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

37) G. N. Teplov, Still-Life and Parrot, 1737, oil on canvas, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

38) Benjamin Patersen, Nevsky Prospect, St Petersburg near the Gostiny Dvor, 1799, oil on canvas, Hermitage, St Petersburg.

39) Stroganoff Palace from Nevsky Prospect, Rastrelli, based on plans by Richard de Montferrand, St Isaacs Cathedral, 1819-58.

40) Domenico Tressani, Views of Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, 1714-1733.

41) Auguste de Montferrand, St Isaacs Cathedral, St Petersburg, 1818-1858.

42) Interior of St Isacc’s: Interior of the great dome, honouring the Holy Spirit.

43) Wintry view from the top of St Isaac’s Cathedral.

44) Domenico Tressani, Winter Palace, later Hermitage, St Petersburg, begun 1730s.

45) Le Blond (comp by Rastrelli), Peterhof, St Petersburg.

46) Grand Peterhof Palace & the Grand Cascade.

47) Ivan Nikitin, Peter the Great on his Death Bed, 1725, oil on canvas, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

48) Equestrian statue of Ivan the Terrible, Oryol, near Moscow, set up 2016.

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Assessing Peter the Great.

It is evident from reading the material on Peter the Great that modern historians have a tendency to view the Tsar in terms of dictators and ideological movements of the 20^th century.[1] Thus Cracraft sees Peter’s reign in terms of a “cultural revolution”; Anisimov says that “Peter also evaluated art from the position of a technocrat.”[2] And Hughes saw the portraits in the Russian Historical Museum as examples of “cultural engineering.” Should we therefore see Peter as an “engineer of human souls,” to use Stalin’s phrase? Peter was a “technocrat” in the sense that he was both engineer and ideologue; he believed in the practical side of culture, including the arts; but he employed them as part of his agenda of forcing a worldview on his people. But if he sought to do this through the Europeanization of Russian art, he was unsuccessful; yes, he set up an Academy of Art but although there were some fine portraits produced, most of them were derivative and hardly spread a sense of Russian identity; that would come in the 19^th century with a rise in nationalistic sentiment. And it is significant that Peter mainly entrusted his own image to a brace of foreign painters trained in an academic tradition something he had learned about on his Grand Tour of 1699. No: Peter was more successful with architecture and town-planning which in the form of St Petersburg (along with various social reforms that cannot be gone into here) changed the way Russians- and visitors from abroad- saw daily life. It can be no accident that there were large numbers of architects in the city’s Academy of Fine Art founded in 1757; thousands of architects built St Petersburg and made it the symbol not only of Peter’s western ambitions, but of a complete break with the Old Muscovite traditions. If one is looking for evidence of Peter as a moderniser, then one need only take a stroll along Nevsky Prospect and observe how “Peter’s line” and Petersburg baroque changed ways of seeing in Russia forever.

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[1] Interestingly, the reverse seems to be true of Ivan the Terrible as some historians are trying to reconstruct him as an enlightened ruler; the first monument to the Tsar was erected in the city of Oryol, 200 kms from Moscow this year.

[2] Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great, 26. According to Anisimov’s translator John T Alexander, Anisimov was outspoken on the Stalinist purge of Leningrad historians in the 1930s, The Reforms of Peter the Great, ix.

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The Petersburg Style in Architecture.

If one were to make Hughes’s comparison between Moscow and St Petersburg in the realm of architecture, one would more easily be able to draw a distinction between the buildings of the two centres. In Moscow – even today- the traditional Muscovite forms of decorative tent roofs, mosques and onion domes triumph. Russian architecture was left out of a historical evolution that incorporated the sequence of classical (including the orders), gothic (medieval) and the renaissance, the launch pad of the modern style which only came to Russia during Ivan III’s rule. Russia’s backwardness in building design was noted by European countries which is why in 1717 after Peter had started his architectural reforms, the Paris Academy of Sciences named him an honorary fellow, not only for his military victories over Sweden, but for Peter’s contribution to civilisation. As Cracraft points out, the members of academies in Europe would have regarded Old Russia architectural form as inconsistent with “clearly defined ways” of building churches and houses as set out in the tripartite division above.[1] Anybody stepping off the train in St Petersburg will immediately note the difference in the style of buildings than Moscow: there is more linearity, order and horizontal emphasis then in cities like Moscow and Novgorod where the curved skyline is a frequent landmark. “Peter’s line” to use the phrase of the Russian novelist Andrei Bely whose 1916 novel Petersburg is a virtual Baedeker of the city was marked by parallel lines marked out by Peter like the very famous rectilinear street, Nevsky Prospect; Bely also writes of Petrine houses (designed by the architect Tressini): “some were enclosed in granite, others with low fences of stone, still others with fences of wood.” Bely concludes with an architectural history condensed into a sentence: “Peter’s line turned into the line of a later age; the rounded one of Catherine (the Great), the regular ranks of colonnades.”[2] The “simple baroque” is exemplified in Domenico Trezzani’s Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul (1714-1733) above which apart from its piercing spire (the highest in the city at 394 ft) is recognisable as a product of the baroque. This church served as the resting place of all Russian rulers from Peter the Great on.[3] This can be compared with St Isaac’s Cathedral (though this is 19th century) which awkwardly meshes baroque towers, neo-classical façade and Muscovite helmet domes in a startling confection; its major draw though must surely be the spectacular views of the city from the top. Turning to civic architecture, the Winter Palace designed by Rastrelli in 1754 is an over-decorated structure that is notable for its length; as we shall see next week the Empress Elizabeth ornamented it while Catherine relieved Rastrelli of his duties and turned it into the oversize jewel box that would become the Hermitage museum. The successful formula of classicising Russian architecture without completely discarding its heritage can be seen in the “Russian Versailles,” Peterhof Palace, the summer residence of the Tsar designed by Le Blond in the regency style surrounded by a large park. Le Blonde’s architectural masterpiece consists of white walls and baroque domes which are entirely gilded, decoration which owed more to Tressini who took over the project when Le Blonde died tragically early in 1719. In the words of Bunt: “a plain cake [was] elaborated with superfluous icing.”[4]

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[1] Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great, 78.

[2] Bely, Petersburg, 12-13. Bely’s annotator states: “Bely gives a capsule history of the major architectural styles which shaped the city: the relatively simple northern baroque of Peter’s reign, the flamboyant rococo of the Empress Elizabeth’s times, the sober but elegant neoclassical style of Catherine the Great and her grandson, Alexander I.”

[3] According to Bely’s annotator, “The spire throws the rest of the building out of proportion, and “was an aggressive assertion of Peter’s wish that the horizon of St Petersburg should be the antithesis of the rounded, bell-like aspect of Moscow.” Quoting George Hamilton’s The Art and Architecture of Russia (1954).

[4] Cyril G. Bunt, Russian Art: From Scyths to Soviets, (The Studio: London and New York, 1946), 68.

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The Petrine Image by Foreign Painters.

The representation of Peter the Great (and his wife Catherine I) in the arts deserves a section to itself as it is quite a vast topic involving a variety of media: Peter is painted, printed, carved, and sculpted.[1] He also appears in a number of guises, Hercules (for his victories over the Swedish “lion”), and Samson who forced apart the lion’s jaws. He is St George, Neptune, Jupiter, and Pygmalion; he also appears as himself and a miscellany of virtuous heroes on the coinage of the realm. In oil painting, a large number of royal portraits in a multiplicity of styles by artists from both Russian and European nations exist in originals, copies, or problematic attributions. Most of the images of Peter are by foreign artists which is not surprising given the lack of talent in Russia before Peter revolutionized art training there. Peter’s wife the Tsaritsa Catherine Alekseeva, later Empress Catherine I, was painted by J. M. Nattier in 1717, who worked for Peter in Holland; but though Nattier painted the Tsar in the grand baroque manner, Peter preferred Dutch artists, therefore it is predictable that a large number of his portraits were painted by Dutch artists. In Amsterdam in 1717 portraits of Peter and Catherine were painted from life by Arnold Boonen, an artist who the Tsar grew to like and Karl Moor (Carel de Moor). The Boonen portraits have unfortunately disappeared, though a portrait of the Tsar in the Rijksmuseum by Rembrandt’s pupil Aert de Gelder (above) exists which was painted at the same time.[2]A number of portraits of the royal couple exist which have been attributed to Moor, though these may be copies by a Russian artist from the Dutch original. There is Kneller’s full length portrait of 1698 which adopts the formula of his earlier portrait of James II (1684-5). Kneller (1646- 1723) was the most famous portraitist of his day; he came from Lübeck and trained in Leyden and Amsterdam, hence another Dutch link. Peter was obviously pleased with his portrait because afterwards he commissioned miniatures painted on enamel and decorated with gemstones. There are less portraits of the Tsar in sculpture, though Peter admired the art and desired it for the gardens and interiors of the royal palace; but disappointedly there is hardly any worthy of mention save for some of the monuments of the Italian C. B. Rastrelli (1675-1744) a Florentine sculptor who moved to Russia in 1716. There he worked primarily as an architect and participated in the planning of Vasilevskiy Island in St Petersburg. Amongst foreign artists who carved Peter’s image are Rastrelli and Marie-Anne Collot, the daughter-in-law of the more famous sculptor Falconet who carved the famous equestrian statue of the Tsar during Catherine the Great’s reign.

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[1] Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 207.

[2] Another theory is that this was painted later in St Petersburg by an unknown artist, then brought to Holland as an official gift, Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution, 197.

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The Petersburg Style in Portraiture & Other Genres

The main genre in Russian painting during Peter’s era is portraiture which is unsurprising as it developed from effigies of people on icons; the parsuna (a word from the Polish for persona) had an effect on “westernized” portrait painting in St Petersburg.[1] We see the ghost of the parsuna genre in portraits by Russian artists like A Antropov (1716-1795), I Argunov (1727-1802), A Matveev (1701-1739) and A P Losenko (1737-1773).[2]This group of painters are responsible for the establishing of the modern portrait in Russia. Their work is assured though not remarkable; it is also derivative of European artistic traditions. Unlike Russian travelling artists (see below) I Vishnyakov (1699-1761) stayed at home but studied under Louis Caravaque, a French painter living in Russia (1618-1754) who painted a portrait of Peter at Astrakhan. Helping to spread European portraiture northwards, Vishnyakov’s most well-known portrait is that of the English girl Sarah Fermor, a visitor to Russia. Though portraiture was easily the most important genre, we should be mindful of others, no matter how rare. Interior decoration was one of these as there is evidence that motifs from allegorical baroque painting had spread from St Petersburg to Moscow by the 1720s. Experiencing a considerable delay, still-life did not really establish itself in Russia until the 19^th century, but there were a few produced during Peter’s reign like G. N. Teplov’s Still Life with Parrot (above) painted for the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1737. The port of St Petersburg has a cold, pristine beauty of its own, so we should expect to see it as a source of inspiration for some marine painters. One of these by F Ia Alekseev, View of the Winter Palace Embankment, St Petersburg (1790s) is a good example which shows the influence of the French painter of townscapes- Hubert Robert.

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[1] Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution, 191: “The very term parsuna as distinct from portret has come to designate in Russian a kind of effigy, iconic in type, and far more symbolic as such than realistic in representation: an artifact precisely of Old or pre-Petrine Russia.”

[2] Auty and Obolensky, An Introduction to Russian Art and Architecture, 84-85.

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A Russian Academy of Art.

According to Cracraft three main aspects of Peter’s Cultural Revolution have been studied in detail- the architectural, the visual and the verbal.[1] We shall study the first later, omit the last completely and now turn to the second which obviously encompasses visual art. Though Peter was not hostile to painting he was no aesthete; for him, painting provided another plank of his westernizing policy; thus he encouraged foreign artists to come to Russia, and just as importantly sent Russian artists to Europe. During his Grand Tour the Tsar himself took art lessons and an etching exists of an Allegory of the Russian Victory over the Turks at Azov (the inscription is in Dutch), though corrections by his teacher Schoonebeck are detectable. The Tsar responded positively to a proposal by a senior official to found a “small Academy” for the purpose of “proper training in drawing..and the other arts..following the customs of the European realms” in 1721. The first president of the St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts would be Shuvalov whose portrait was painted by Losenko who was one of the first Russian artists to study in Paris.[2] If one did not know better, one might think Losenko’s Vladimir and Rogneda (above) was painted by a 17th century French Caravaggisti like Valentin. Perhaps with his own tentative efforts in mind, Peter was keen to have his artists foster a strong programme of drawing. In 17^th century Russia most of the drawing in artists like Simon Ushakov was too dependent upon the medieval and craft traditions. The conventions of podlinniki (pattern books) and priorsi were hardly indicative of an academic drawing style.[3] Gradually, however European drawing styles began to be transmitted to Russia as we can see from the Viniusa Album, named after the Dutch merchant and collector Andreus Vinius who were received into the Russian Orthodox Church by the Patriarch Nikon. The types and styles in the Vinius Album are predominantly Dutch and Flemish with designs by the likes of Jan Lievans (1607-1674)

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[1] Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great, 77.

[2] James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery, (University of Chicago, 1997), 235,

[3] James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution, 154f.

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Russians in Europe.

Amongst the documents surviving from the 17^th century are a handful of travel diaries and note-books belonging to members of the Russian elite. One of these is P. A. Tolstoy (1645-1729, later Count) above who with great perception and delight indulged his curiosity about art, buildings and music as he travelled through Poland, Austria and Italy between 1697-99 on a diplomatic mission. Sitting in a catholic church in Minsk, Belorussia, Tolstoy was seduced by music and art before he even got to baroque Rome which overwhelmed him with its churches, art, atmosphere and music. As Cracraft says, with such documents we see how the Russian elite began to be captivated by art, and they sensed that their own art was hugely inferior to that of Italy, the Netherlands and other European regions. A few years after Tolstoy’s diplomatic peregrinations, Russian artists and diplomats at Peter’s direction began to trek westwards, taking residence in Vienna, Rome, the Hague, Berlin, Paris and London. Matveev worked under Carel de Moor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and spent eleven years in the Netherlands. He was the first Russian artist wholly taught outside the country. In 1727, Matveev returned home, where he became the Chief Artist at the Court in Saint Petersburg. Amongst the first Russian painters to study in Italy were Fedor Cherkasov, Mikhail Zakharov and the Nikitin brothers. Ivan Nikitin (d 1741) along with his brother Roman were sent to Venice and Florence by Peter the Great who learned with approval that “they were not wasting their time” in Venice and were “learning Italian well.” Ivan’s early portraits show the influence of the parsuna (no perspective, strict local colours, no backgrounds) but all that disappears in his later portraits which veer towards the baroque. Sadly, after Peter’s death Ivan’s fortunes would decline in more than one sense- he found it hard to get commissions, found himself out of favour and was exiled to Siberia in 1737.

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“A City Out of Nothing”

Later artists have undoubtedly, though understandably, romanticised the origins of the city that is named after Peter the Great, with paintings of Peter staring out to sea (above) as he dreams of his great port while his courtiers clutch at their hats as the wind off the Neva threatens to snatch them away.[1] Others show Peter marching sharply through his rapidly growing city while his courtiers strive to keep pace with their impatient Tsar who strides on while barking out orders. The traditional date for the founding of St Petersburg is supposed to be 17^th May 1703, though inexplicably no records of the event survive in the court journals. The fanciful story that Peter was led to the spot by an eagle which later alighted on Peter’s arm has been long dismissed; in fact it is quite probable that the Tsar was not even there for the founding. A more plausible origin for Peter’s city on the Baltic was probably his interest in military fortification after he had conquered the Turks at Azov in 1695-96. As Cracraft reasonably suggests “it was in the Azov campaigns and subsequent building projects that Peter first seriously utilized the techniques of modern siegecraft and fortification, and first faced the difficulties of town planning,” experience and skill he would put to good use when planning and constructing “Peter’s City.”[2] As for the idea that the city came “out of nothing,” from empty land is wrong; there were habitations and populated residences including the residences of Swedish officials long before Peter arrived. And though in a letter to one of his courtiers Peter referred to the spot as his paradise, the location belied that idea since the climate was most inhospitable, the temperatures very cold, and the land itself was a mosquito- infected marshland which made erecting a settlement there let only a great city a daunting prospect.

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[1] This account is the invention of Pushkin who used it in his poem “The Bronze Horseman” (1833) which pictures the tsar looking out over a wilderness dotted with an occasional fisherman’s hut”, Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 210-211. With the outbreak of World War I, the name was Russianised to Petrograd; and in 1924 was re-named as Leningrad. It reverted to St Petersburg in 1991.

[2] Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great, 81.

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From Moscow to St Petersburg

In her voluminous survey of Peter the Great’s Russia, the historian and art historian Lindsey Hughes suggested that in order to get a sense of the cultural difference between Moscow and St Petersburg, one should first visit the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and then the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. The one created in 1856 by the merchant Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov is filled to the brim with outstanding examples of Russian icon painting such as we have been sampling over the last few weeks. By contrast, the portraits in the Russian Museum conjure up the era of William and Mary, and offers more of a European experience.[1] Yet as Hughes asks do these portraits of elegantly dressed rulers and courtier complete with fashionable hairstyles and settings “reflect Russian reality?” As with most cultural situations, deeper research reveals a more complex and interesting story. Here despite Peter’s Cultural Revolution, reforming programme, whatever one calls it, an “attempt at cultural engineering” is on show, not the outward expression of the completed revolution.[2] Another point Hughes highlights is that despite artistic and cultural innovation being concentrated in St Petersburg, the material and symbolic place of reform, before 1710 the leading Russian artists were to be found in Moscow. Indeed the geometrical order found in St Petersburg has its origins in Moscow- see below. Moreover during this period Moscow art seems to be a mainly domestic affair: the armoury accounts for 1701-2 list no foreign painters. Instead we see names like Ivan Saltanov (1630s-1703) (above), Mikhail Choglokov, and Grigory Odol’sky, most of whom were traditional icon painters. A break between this traditional workshop activity and Peter’s modern Russia is symbolised in Zherebtsov’s creation of triumphal gates, which were an innovation of the Petrine era. These are derived from Roman models and appear after the capture of Azov in 1696. Though the building of St Petersburg (“a city out of nothing”) tempts us to claim an artistic break from Muscovite art, we should be careful of neglecting the old city’s role in the Petrine revolution.

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[1] Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, (Yale University Press, 1998), 203.

[2] James Cracraft observes that Peter’s revolution was not social nor economic, but cultural, that is to say having to do with making and doing things, thinking and talking about them; these fundamental changes would emerge through language, art, music, painting, sculpture, the graphic arts; other forms of culture would be cooking, dressing, dancing, courting, fencing etc. James Cracraft: The Revolution of Peter the Great (Harvard University Press, 2003), 75-76.

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A Backward Country.

The Russia that Peter was born into in 1672 had passed through a turbulent period and was certainly ripe for reform and modernization. In 1667 wars with Poland-Lithuania and Sweden had ended with left bank Ukraine and Kiev brought under the Tsar’s control. Russia had always been blocked to the Baltic by Sweden and the creation of St Petersburg is a symbol of Peter’s Baltic ambitions. There was no control over the census with many wanderers escaping the scrutiny of the authorities. Peasants made up 90% of the population and towns accounted for no more than 4% of the Muscovite population. There were no real professions; there were no universities in Muscovite Russia; no great poets, playwrights, or scientists were to be seen. The backwardness of Russia’s situation meant that it had a lot of catching up to do in order to keep pace with Europe and western dominions. Inside the Muscovite church dissension was rife; some agreed with the programme of reform, while others like the Old Believer movement (above) resisted such new practices as making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two. At the time of Peter’s birth in 1672 the Russian church was a very schismatic organisation. Though Peter sided with the Russian Orthodox Church his attitude towards religion was complex: he was against monasticism and superstitious practices; the Tsar was also open to re-uniting the Catholic and Orthodox churches. To the Old Believers he was a “tobacco-stained atheist” and the “Anti-Christ”, though Peter seems to “have had no problems with God” to use a phrase of a scholar.[1] Worst of all for the future reformer Peter, foreign influence was rigidly curtailed in the print sphere. Publishing and printing remained in the hands of the church; books in foreign languages reached the libraries of only a few nobles. With no universities in Moscow, scholarship was mainly limited to monks and members of religious orders. All this conspired – in the eyes of Europeans- to present Russia as a “rude and barbarous” country little better than the emperors of China or the caliphs of Turkey. The birth of a Russian prince in 1672 went unobserved and was unremarked upon in the west.

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[1] Evgenii V. Ansimov, trans. John T. Alexander, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Coercion in Russia (New York, 1993), 27.