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Patterns of Petrine Modernization |
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Peter’s
administrative and other reforms represent Russia’s first
attempt at modernization designed to catch up with the advanced
countries of Western Europe. They display certain
characteristics, many of which can be traced in later periods of
major reforms. The Petrine Transformation thus set certain
patterns which would have a lasting effect on much of Russia’s
subsequent development in modern history. Some of the more
important of these are the following. |
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Peter was the first Russian
ruler who inaugurated the pattern of a revolution from above as
the chief response of the backward Russia to the challenge of
the West. This pattern would be maintained down to the end of
the Tsarist regime in 1917 and beyond. Alexander II, another
renowned tsar-reformer, would epitomize the government’s
approach to reform in a famous remark made in his address to the
nobility in 1856. In his speech, which for the first time made
clear his intention to emancipate the serfs, Alexander said it
would be preferable to abolish serfdom ‘from above’ than to wait
for upheaval from below.
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Ironically,
many Russian progressives from the oppositionist and revolutionary
movement agreed with the tsarist government on this point. The
manifest success of the Petrine Reform instilled within the Russian
progressive camp a deep conviction that any fundamental change in
their country could only be initiated from the top and carried
through by the forcible action of the State. For many this attitude
- and the disregard for human sacrifice that it entailed - became an
article of faith. This was true, for instance, of the Narodniks -
Russian peasant socialists of the nineteenth century - many of
whom idolized Peter and his actions and saw in him an ideal patriot.
The worship of Peter thus turned into the recognition of the
beneficial nature of unrestrained violence.
Even Vladimir
Lenin, the Marxist "gravedigger" of Russia’s old regime, sought to
imitate the brutal methods of Peter’s modernization. In 1918, at the
head of the fledgling Soviet state and still hoping for a world
proletarian revolution, he wrote: ‘While the revolution in Germany
is still slow to break out, our task is to learn state capitalism
from the Germans, to do our best to emulate it, not to refrain from
dictatorial methods in order to accelerate this emulation even more
than Peter accelerated the emulation of Westernism by the barbaric
Rus, not to shun barbaric means to fight barbarism’. (Here Lenin
alludes to the famous dictum of Karl Marx that: 'Peter the Great
smashed Russian barbarism by barbarism’.)
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Tsarist Russia |
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