Abstract
Kevin Platt seeks to answer the question: ‘Why did Imperial Russian and then Soviet political culture adopt despotic rulers, responsible for extraordinary violence, as heroic figures and avatars of social identity?’ His exploration makes for a most enjoyable book: freed from the constraints that many historians would feel, Platt considers Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as myths, making use of literature, music, art and cinema as well as more conventional sources. Thus, engagingly, his approach is a mixture of the chronological and the thematic, introducing unlikely artistic bedfellows. For example, Chapter 1, ‘Liminality’, begins with the historians Karamzin and Ustrialov before moving on to the novelists Lazhechnikov and Tolstoi. Chapter 4, ‘Prognostication’, brings in Ilia Repin’s depiction of Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan after considering the third volume of Merezhkovskii’s trilogy, Christ and Antichrist, on Peter the Great’s relationship with his son Aleksei (the first two volumes having concentrated on the last pagan Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate and Leonardo de Vinci). An incisive analysis follows of Paul Miliukov’s Outlines of the History of Russian Culture, concluding with the suggestion that the final citation from Act IV, Scene II of Schiller’s William Tell – ‘And from the ruins blooms a fairer life’ – complements Merezhkovskii’s view of revolutionary redemption.
Yet a book that purports to investigate the work of major historians from Karamzin via Miliukov to the present may legitimately be criticized for omitting Bushkovitch, Cracraft and Hughes, to name but three who have made signal contributions to our understanding of Peter the Great. Moreover, there could have been illuminating comparisons with the commanding figures in the histories of other nations. As Platt himself states (p. 19): ‘In national contexts collective identification commonly focuses on figures who occupy a place of honor at the heart of the collective being: George Washington, Shakespeare, Jeanne d’Arc, Goethe, Elizabeth I, and so on.’ Several of these have presented problems for those seeking to establish collective identification. For example, George Washington owned slaves and was not much concerned about the institution of slavery, while his attitude towards Native Americans was not always charitable. Far from being ‘Good Queen Bess’, Elizabeth I condoned widespread torture and execution. (I once heard the Tudor specialist Joel Hurstfield say that he would rather have taken his chance in Ivan the Terrible’s Russia than Elizabeth’s England.) Lord Acton’s claim that great men are almost always bad men is appropriate here, perhaps.
Platt’s concluding observation (p. 268) of a recent Russian ‘resurgence of the sort of state management of historical knowledge familiar from the Soviet 1930s’ is not only something of an exaggeration but might also encourage thoughts about how ‘homeland security’ and similar concepts have restricted popular understanding of national contexts elsewhere.