Tsar Peter The Great Quotes

Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so because Nicholas knew what he was called.

What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared—not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

Peter returned to Russia determined to remold his country along Western lines. The old Muscovite state, isolated and introverted for centuries, would reach out to Europe and open itself to Europe. In a sense, the flow of effect was circular: the West affected Peter, the Tsar had a powerful impact upon Russia, and Russia, modernized and emergent, had a new and greater influence on Europe. For all three, therefore—Peter, Russia and Europe—the Great Embassy was a turning point.

In the Code of the Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich Romanov there were fifty crimes for which capital punishment could be imposed. By the time of the Military Statutes of Peter the Great there were two hundred.

In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married.

Every country has its grand canvas, Sasha—the so-called masterpiece that hangs in a hallowed hall and sums up the national identity for generations to come. For the French it is Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People; for the Dutch, Rembrandt’s Night Watch; for the Americans, Washington Crossing the Delaware; and for we Russians? It is a pair of twins: Nikolai Ge’s Peter the Great Interrogating Alexei and Ilya Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son. For decades, these two paintings have been revered by our public, praised by our critics, and sketched by our diligent students of the arts. And yet, what do they depict? In one, our most enlightened Tsar studies his oldest son with suspicion, on the verge of condemning him to death; while in the other, unflinching Ivan cradles the body of his eldest, having already exacted the supreme measure with a swing of the scepter to the head.

On the Ostankino channels the President's personal confessor, the Archimandrite Tikhon, dressed in a long black cassock and walking through Istanbul, is telling a prime-time tale about the fall of Byzantium, of how the great Orthodox Empire (to which Russia is the successor) was brought low by a mix of oligarchs and the West. Professional historians howl in protest at this pseudo-history, but the Kremlin is starting to use religion and the supernatural for its own ends. Byzantium and Muscovy could only flourish under one great autocrat, the Archimandrite states. This is why we need the President to be like a tsar.

Anxious to bring both the year and New Year’s Day into line with the West, Peter decreed in December 1699 that the next new year would begin on January 1 and that the coming year would be numbered 1700. In his decree, the Tsar stated frankly that the change was made in order to conform to Western practice.* But to blunt the argument of those who said that God could not have made the earth in the depth of winter, Peter invited them “to view the map of the globe, and, in a pleasant temper, gave them to understand that Russia was not all the world and that what was winter with them was, at the same time, always summer in those places beyond the equator.” To celebrate the change and impress the new day on the Muscovites, Peter ordered special New Year’s services held in all the churches on January 1. Further, he instructed that festive evergreen branches be used to decorate the doorposts in interiors of houses, and he commanded that all citizens of Moscow should “display their happiness by loudly congratulating

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings;1 that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath;2 that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. Yes, not only Chekhov’s heroes, but what normal Russian at the beginning of the century, including any member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, could have believed, would have tolerated, such a slander against the bright future? What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared—not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims. Was it only that explosion of atavism which is now evasively called “the cult of personality” that was so horrible?

the reign of a person who was in many ways the most impressive and innovative tsar in Russian history. Peter the Great, as he came to be known, contended that if Russia was to develop into a powerful and enlightened nation many ancient customs and traditions would have to be abandoned and extensive reforms of the country’s institutions on the Western European model would have to be implemented. It was a worthy and even noble vision of modernization and Westernization, but unfortunately for Russia, Peter had little understanding of human nature, and it never occurred to him that he might be able to persuade his people, many of them, to be sure, ignorant and superstitious, of the desirability of rapid change by means other than raw compulsion. In the end, his attempt to ‘civilize Russia with the Knout’ failed and he did not succeed in ‘binding together a nation lacking in cohesion’. Nonetheless, it must be said that hardly an institution of national significance remained unaffected by his initiatives. He laid the foundations of modern Russia.

The first thing the President had done when he came to power in 2000 was to seize control of television. It was television through which the Kremlin decided which politicians it would ‘allow’ as its puppet opposition, what the country’s history and fears and consciousness should be. And the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesise Soviet control with Western entertainment. Twenty-first-century Ostankino mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism. And at the centre of the great show is the President himself, created from a no one, a grey fuzz via the power of television, so that he morphs as rapidly as a performance artist among his roles of soldier, lover, bare-chested hunter, businessman, spy, tsar, superman. ‘The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him the President,’ TV producers and political technologists liked to

Tis death for anyone to reveal what is spoken in the tsar’s palace,” declared an English resident.

Years were to pass when the Tsar never set foot in Moscow,

Moscow, the Kremlin, the royal family, the Tsar himself at the mercy of ignorant, rioting soldiers.

He extended his hatred to Moscow, the capital of the Orthodox tsars,

Tsar Fedor, who was his godfather as well as his half-brother, said to Natalya,

To encourage Zotov, the Tsar gave him a suite of apartments and raised him to the rank of minor nobleman,

Ironically, Tsar Alexis was the most pious of all the tsars; he surrendered more power to a man of the church

Nikon—than any tsar before or since.

Tsar Alexis’ daughters, were Miloslavskys,

Tsar Alexis and Natalya Naryshkina were married.

From the day of their marriage, it was clear to everyone that the forty-one-year-old Tsar was deeply in love

On Epiphany in January 1676, Tsar Alexis, at forty-seven, healthy and active, took part in the annual ceremony

it grew steadily worse, and after ten days, on February 8, Tsar Alexis died.

The church challenged the church, and the church challenged the tsar.

Another hetman, Ivan Mazepa, made a desperate attempt to save the country, and signed an agreement with Charles XII of Sweden to fight against the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great. However, Swedish troops suffered a disastrous defeat at the battle of Poltava in 1709.

she might have made a model tsaritsa for a conventional Muscovite tsar.

Russian tsar was on salt water.

a Russian tsar was on salt water.

had betrayed the Tsar and allied himself with Charles.

The Tsarevich then pleaded with Prince Vasily Dolgoruky to persuade the Tsar to let him resign the succession peacefully

Clothed in majesty, he might step easily into the full omnipotence of being tsar.

Like Peter the Great against Charles XII, Tsar Alexander decided to avoid a direct trial of strength and to rely instead on his most highly prized assets: space and climate.

During the same time, it was faced with the first series of wars with Russia, as the new Tsar, Peter the Great implemented a new policy of “access to the sea.” This prevented the Ottoman’s Crimean allies, who usually sent cavalry reinforcements to fight alongside regular Ottoman troops, from supporting Ottoman forces in central Europe. Despite several Russian defeats, the conflict ended with the capture of Azov, the Ottoman’s stronghold in Crimea in 1696, and was a sign of the growing threat Russia posed to the Ottomans. Russia increasingly saw the Ottoman Empire as its objective rival in its quest to assert control over the Black Sea.

Most of the Streltsy were simple Russians, living by the old ways, revering both tsar and patriarch, hating innovation and opposing reforms.

What is remarkable is that Herzen, in the earlier years of Alexander II’s reign (1855–81), combined this “Russian socialism,” as it came to be called, with the theory of progressive autocracy. He called upon Alexander to be a “crowned revolutionary,” and a “tsar of the land,” and to continue Peter the Great’s cause of reform by breaking with the Petersburg period as resolutely as Peter had broken with the Moscow period.