To those who had been close to Peter, his loss seemed irreparable. Andrei Nartov, the young lathe turner with whom Peter had worked almost every day in his last years, declared, "Although Peter the Great is no longer with us, his spirit lives in our souls and we who have had the honor to be near the monarch will die true to him and our warm love for him will be buried with us." Neplyuev, the young naval officer whom Petere had sent as ambassador to Constantinople, wrote, "This monarch has brought our country to a level with others. He taught us to recognize that we are a people. In brief, everything that we look upon in Russia has its origin in him, and everything which is done in the future will be derived from this source."
As the century progressed, veneration of Peter became almost a cult. Mikhail Lomonosov, Russia's first notable scientist, described Peter as "a God-like man" and wrote, "I see him everywhere, now enveloped in a cloud of dust, of smoke, of flame, now bathed in sweat at the end of strenuous toil. I refuse to believe that there was but one Peter and not several." Gavril Derzhavin, Russia's finest eighteenth-century poet, wondered, "Was it not God who in his person came down to earth?" The clever German Empress Catherine the Great, desiring to identify herself more closely with her giant Russian predecessor, commissioned a heroic bronze statue by the French sculptor Falconet. A miniature cliff of 1,6000 tons of granite was dragged to the bank of the Neva to form a pedestal. The Emperor, wearing a cape and crowned with laurel, sits firmly astride a fiery, rearing stallion which is trampling a snake beneath its hooves; Peter's right arm is flung out, pointing imperiously across the river to the Peter and Paul Fortress—and to the future. The figure, which captures Peter's exuberance, vitality and absolute authority, immediately became the most famous statue in Russia. When Alexander Pushkin wrote his immortal poem "The Bronze Horseman," the statue found a permanent place in literature.
There were, of course, dissenting views. The hope of the common people that Peter's death would mean a lifting of their heavy burdens of service and taxation expressed itself in a popular lithograph titled "The Mice Bury the Cat." This sly work depicts an enormous whiskered cat with a recognizable face, now trussed on a sledge with its paws in the air, being dragged away by a band of celebrating mice. In the nineteenth century, traditionalists who believed in the inherent values of Muscovite culture blamed Peter as the first to open the door to Western ideas and innovations. "We began [in Peter's reign] to be citizens of the world," said the conservative historian Nikolai Karamzin, "but we ceased in some measure to be citizens of Russia." A grand-scale historical and philosophical debate evolved between two schools: the "Slavophiles" who deplored the contamination and destruction of old Russian culture and institutions, and the "Westeraizers" who admired and praised Peter for suppressing the past and forcing Russia onto the road of progress and enlightenment. The arguments often became heated, as when the influential literary critic Vassarion Belinsky described Peter as "the most extraordinary phenomenon not only in our history but in the history of mankind ... a deity who has called us into being and who has breathed the breath of life into the body of ancient Russia, colossal, but prostrate in deadly slumber."
Soviet historians have not had an easy time coping with the figure of Peter the Great. Required to write history within the framework not only of general Marxist theory and terminology but also of the current party line, they sway back and forth between portraying Peter as irrelevant (individuals play no part in historical evolution), as an exploitative autocrat building "a national state of landowners and merchants," and as a national hero defending Russia against external enemies. A small but graphic example of this ambivalence is the treatment of Peter at the Poltava Battlefield Museum. A large statue of the Emperor stands in front of the museum, and the visual exhibits inside all emphasize the presence and role of Peter. But the written material in captions and booklets obediently ascribes the victory to the efforts of "the fraternal Russian and Ukrainian peoples."
Peter himself was realistic and philosophical about the way he was seen and would be remembered. Osterman recalled a conversation with a foreign ambassador in which Peter asked what the opinion was of him abroad.
"Sire," replied the ambassador, "everyone has the highest and best opinion of Your Majesty. The world is astonished above all at the wisdom and genius you display in the execution of the vast designs which you have conceived and which have spread the glory of your name to the most distant regions."
"Very well, very well, that may be," said Peter impatiently, "but flattery says as much of every king when he is present. My object is not to see the fair side of things, but to know what judgment is formed of me on the opposite side of the question. I beg you to tell it to me, whatever it may be."
The ambassador bowed low. "Sire," he said, "since you order me, I will tell you all the ill I have heard. You pass for an imperious and severe master who treats his subjects rigorously, who is always ready to punish and incapable of forgiving a fault."
"No, my friend," said Peter, smiling and shaking his head, "this is not all. I am represented as a cruel tyrant; this is the opinion foreign nations have formed of me. But how can they judge? They do not know the circumstances I was in at the beginning of my reign, how many people opposed my designs, counteracted my most useful projects and obliged me to be severe. But I never treated anyone cruelly or gave proofs of tyranny. On the contrary, I have always asked the assistance of such of my subjects as have shown marks of intelligence and patriotism, and who, doing justice to the rectitude of my intentions, have been disposed to second them. Nor have I ever failed to testify my gratitude by loading them with favors."
The arguments about Peter and the controversies over his reforms have never ended. He has been idealized, condemned, analyzed again and again, and still, like the broader issues of the nature and future of Russia itself, he remains essentially mysterious. One quality which no one disputes is his phenomenal energy. "Eternal toiler upon the throne of Russia," Pushkin described him. "It is an age of gold in which we are living," Peter himself wrote to Menshikov. "Without loss of a single instant, we devote all our energies to work." He was a force of nature, and perhaps for this reason no final judgment will ever be delivered. How does one judge the endless roll of the ocean or the mighty power of the whirlwind?
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