It wasn't even a hint on Europe: how Peter the First plunged the country into Asiaticism

Sergey Baimukhametov, publicist, author of books on history

The Great Northern War ended three hundred years ago. Peter the Great became emperor, and Russia became an empire. According to the Nishtad Peace Treaty, Russia annexed Livonia, Estonia, Ingermanland. Most importantly, it got access to the Baltic Sea. What Peter "thought" in Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman" came true:

Nature destined for us here

To cut a window to Europe

Stand firm by the sea.

Here on new waves for them

All flags will visit us,

And we'll celebrate with feasting in the open.

By the way, Francesco Algarotti was the first to write about the “window to Europe”. What Pushkin informed the readers about in the footnote to the first edition of The Bronze Horseman.

F. Algarotti (1712-1764) - Italian writer, art connoisseur, popularizer of sciences, traveler, adventurer. In the book "Letters about Russia", 1739, he stated: "St. Petersburg is the window through which Russia looks to Europe."

That is, even then Algarotti absolutely precisely defined the essence of Peter's policy: not Europe, not a door, but only one window through which we only LOOK.

Pushkin borrowed this metaphor, and, having remade it into a powerful image, put it into Peter's thoughts. Peter himself allegedly said: "We need Europe for several decades, and then we must turn our backs to it." This was recorded by a person close to the emperor, Count Osterman.

IN. Klyuchevsky believed that "rapprochement with Europe was in Peter's eyes only a means to an end, and not the end itself." There was only one goal - complete, absolute power. In its so-called "Asian" version.

Peter's reign lasted 36 years. His deeds are grandiose. A regular army, access to the sea, 200 factories and plants in a country where there was practically no manufacturing industry, education for noble and non-noble youth, a naval academy, a navigation and medical school, an artillery and engineering school, Latin and mathematical schools, primary schools in provincial cities, garrison schools for soldiers' children. The state budget has tripled.

“But the tactile signs of this enrichment were found not in the rise in the general level of the people's well-being, but in the statements of state income,” wrote the historian V.O. Klyuchevsky. - The working generation, which got Peter, worked not for themselves, but for the state, and after the intensified and improved work left almost poorer than their fathers. "

Pre-revolutionary Russian historians M.V. Klochkov and P.N. Miliukov, in his studies, come to the conclusion that the population of Russia has significantly decreased during the reign of Peter the Great.

Why, under Peter, the people did not become rich, and in general, Russian life was not settled for the good? Let's say you can't do everything in a short time of the reign of one person. But in 36 years it is quite possible to lay the right foundation, to create the foundations. However, even then, on the foundation erected by Peter, the walls still swayed, no matter how they were built.

Collective delusion

Disputes about the role of Peter the Great in the history of our country have not subsided for three centuries. They are still relevant today, against the background of aggravated relations with the West.

But what we habitually think and say about Peter the Great is a fact of collective delusion. In an especially heavy size. On the scale of a huge country. First Russia, then the Soviet Union, now Russia again.

The assessments of Peter's deeds were settled in two versions. Some say that he turned the country from the age-old Russian path to a vicious Europe and thus ruined it. Others - that he did not trust, did not bring us to Europe, did not completely eradicate the racial, interior and backward. However, both of them agree on one key word - Europe. Like, he turned to Europe. Or - he mistrusted Europe.

This is what puzzles me. Or rather - dumbfounded. In my opinion, we have a case of mass historical self-hypnosis. In fact, Peter did not turn us to any Europe, but quite the opposite - he turned us to Asia, to Asia! More precisely - in the Asiatic.

By Asiaticism, I mean, first of all, the overwhelming priority of the state over society. And hence - not only the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, but a very special phenomenon, the phenomenon - GRACE to the bureaucracy, so characteristic of many residents of the countries of the once Soviet Central Asia.

There was no need to pull Russia to Europe. Russia, Russians - was and is a European nation. Yes, no one denies the Polovtsian, Turkic-Mongolian component. There was no state called "Kievan Rus" in nature, this is a scientific term introduced by Russian historians in the 19th century - for convenience of designation. That state was called the Kiev Kaganate or the Russian Kaganate. Princes Vladimir the Holy, Yaroslav the Wise were called kagans. The Russian princes of the Middle Ages had more Polovtsian blood than Slavic. Probably more than a third of noble families - from there, Polovtsian-Horde roots. The Russians became a super-ethnos because they combined, melted down the Slavic, Turkic-Horde-steppe, Finno-Ugric, Baltic, and all together they made up the Russian European nation and followed the path of European civilization. Without much effort, naturally. Undoubtedly, the choice of faith - Christian, Orthodox - had an effect. But surely there was also something deep, primordial, programmed from nature. As they say nowadays, the national mentality.

And Russia did not have such a special path. And there was the usual path of a European country, albeit not a very simple path.

What is Europeanness? Forced beard shaving? Drinking coffee? Advanced technique and manners? We have adopted and are adopting all this from the times of Peter the Great - and still lag behind. Because Europe is, first of all, a system of social, political structure.

The first Russian economist Ivan Tikhonovich Pososhkov in his book "On Poverty and Wealth" (1724) wrote that there are two types of wealth: material and immaterial, by which he meant legality, right, competent government, and called for taking care of this, baking: "In addition to material wealth, it is necessary for all of us to talk about immaterial wealth, that is, about the true truth."

The history of Europe is the history of the struggle of monarchs with feudal lords and free cities. Nobody won a complete victory in it. But in the process, the central power was also strengthened, and at the same time, the property and civil rights of the estates, of the entire population were conquered and legislatively consolidated. As they said in the Soviet-Marxist era, the law of the unity and struggle of opposites. Dialectics, however.

And the church was the arbiter - as the highest, spiritual power. This is how the European countries came to the present constitutional monarchies and parliamentary republics.

Russia followed the same path. And our boyar opposition and the Boyar Duma would become a parliamentary, civil institution. If they hadn't broken her spine. The first Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible began, and the first Russian emperor Peter the Great finished. Both of them, fighting the boyars, used the eternal conflict of generations.

Children versus fathers

Youth always denies the experience of elders, wants it in its own way. The balance here is established by life itself. But when the power arms and sets the younger against the older, it turns out not the progressive youth, but the guardsmen and hungweipings. Let's think: what did it mean - to publicly shave off the beard of a noble elderly, or even an old man, a boyar? Then imagine that you, a man, revealingly, in front of the public, are raped on stage, in the criminal language: “lowered” - that's what it meant, because a beard in those days was considered a symbol of male dignity. That is why the historian Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy considered Peter's comrades-in-arms to be crooks and scum: "Worthy Russian people could not join Peter ..."

Peter completed the rout of the boyars, begun by Ivan the Terrible. The dynamic, dialectical balance in society was destroyed. The era of Asian absolutism began. Because Ivan and Peter in the bud destroyed and destroyed the seeds of civil institutions.

Peter also eliminated the church as a center of spiritual power, influencing secular power. An arbitrator who stands over kings and people. He saw in the influence of the patriarch and the church a diminution of his power. And fought them in every way. From adolescence to death. During his reign, the "Most Drunken Council", consisting of the tsar and his entourage, lied in the country. Its members bore church titles with the addition of obscene names and titles, committed lewdness, parodying church rituals, smoked not incense, but sulfur, drunk to death, went to praise Christ in Moscow in a sleigh pulled by pigs. It was a mockery of the church and its rituals, humiliation and vilification in front of the people.

The result of the struggle of Peter the Great against the church was the abolition of the patriarchate in Russia. He created the Synod, making the church a state, bureaucratic department, completely subordinate to the autocrat. That is, he put the church at the service of the authorities. What is even more destructive for public consciousness.

The result is known.

It is no coincidence that Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were the model statesmen in Russian history for Stalin. It is no coincidence that the Stalinist and post-Stalinist propaganda instilled their historical cult in our minds. For example, the novel by Alexei Tolstoy "Peter the First" and the films "Ivan the Terrible" and "Peter the First" shaped the view of that era among the Soviet people. The chest heaved and the eyes burned - that's how it should be, let us renounce the old and mossy world, forward along the path of progress, to Europe!

This is how we were taught and inspired that the European way is when the whole country is squeezed in a single fist. With the help of the General Bureaucratic System, the founder of which was Peter the Great and which lives to this day even in detail, in the same Table of Ranks, now recreated by the Russian bureaucratic apparatus. And as Marx wrote, the state itself is the property of officials.

A 98-meter (!) Monument hangs over Moscow: Peter the First lifts a scroll into the sky with one, and the other holds the steering wheel of the ship. A symbol of ruling Russia?

Leo Tolstoy (by the way, one of his ancestors was a confidante of Peter the Great in torture cases) wrote this not so much about Peter as about his exaltation:

“A raging, drunken beast rotted from syphilis has been killing people for a quarter of a century, executing, burning, burying alive in the ground, imprisoning his wife, debauchering, sodomy, drinking, amusing himself, chopping off heads, blaspheming, riding like a cross made of shanks in the form of childbearing organs and the likeness of the Gospels - to glorify Christ with a box of vodka, that is, to swear at faith, crowns [...] his own and his lover, ruins Russia and executes his son and dies of syphilis, and not only do they not remember his atrocities, but to this day the praises of the valor of this monster do not cease, and there is no end to all kinds of monuments to him. And the unfortunate young generations grow up under the false notion that there is nothing to remember about all the previous horrors, that they are all redeemed by those invented benefits that their perpetrators brought, and conclude that the same will happen with the current atrocities, that all this is like - it will be redeemed as the former was redeemed. "

Inferiority complex

Everywhere humiliating and denying everything Russian, extolling and implanting everything European (but by no means in the socio-political structure!), Peter the Great gave rise to a cruel inferiority complex in Russian people. That breaks hearts and minds ever since. It was from the time of Peter the Great that Russian people began to feel ashamed of themselves, of their history, to renounce their Asian past and blood-historical relationship with Asians.

On the one hand, there seems to be a desire for Europe, an awareness of themselves as Europeans. On the other hand, we ourselves were not sure that we were Europe, we did not feel equal.

Hence - all kinds of torment and glances, throwing and suffering of the soul. For example, anger and resentment, as in Dostoevsky: “And what have we achieved? The results are strange: the main thing is that everyone in Europe is looking at us with mockery ... We wagged in front of them, we obsequiously confessed our "European" views and beliefs to them, but they did not listen down to us ... "

Chaadaev convinced us how wonderful and beneficial for the people, society and state European Catholicism is in comparison with our Orthodoxy.

Turgenev, who lived and died for a long time in France, wrote that a Russian person behaves abroad as if everyone there has the right to kick him in the face.

Blok formulated his view of Russia on Europe: "She looks, looks, looks into you And with hatred and with love! .."

Hence the explosions, the extremes of the Russian people - from self-abasement to arrogance, from good nature to aggression and threats to blow the whole European house to hell with sabers or missiles.

An inferiority complex is a terrible destructive force.

Obviously, the course of history has shown and proved that the foundation of the Petrine state, despite its Stalinist colossal nature, is in fact crooked, terrible, not suitable for building a good house and living in it. And that's how we live. The legacy of Peter. Still believing that "Peter the First" and "Europe" are synonyms. And what are the synonyms - so are the antonyms.

Hence the monstrous gaps in consciousness, the combination of the incompatible. In our country, unlike in the West, everything depended and depends on officials: political, business and cultural life. At the same time, according to polls of sociologists, the absolute majority of Russians do not respect officials, are confident in their self-interest and bribery. At the same time, the same majority yearns for a "strong hand" and considers Russia to be a special civilization, where the European way of life will never take root.

That is, it is not only about Peter and not only about the cataclysms of his era. History is history. What was - what was. The point is what and how we think about Peter today.

The current president of the country, Vladimir Putin, considers Peter the Great to be an example of a statesman with whom he would like to meet and talk ...

According to polls of sociologists, of all the rulers of the past, Russians give exclusive preference to Peter the Great.

And as we think - so we act, so we live. An imprecise thought is destructive.

Devastation, it is in the heads.