Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths by Kevin M. F Platt (review)

Abstract

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 898 full military discipline. His subsequent change of heart finally discredited Kerenskii in the eyes of almost all army officers, who declined thereafter to support him when the Bolsheviks overthrew his government. Bushkovitch offers no explanation of what ‘Soviets’ were. The translation, ‘council’ (p. 285), does not do justice to them as institutions of direct democracy in which workers and soldiers aspired to take charge of their own lives. Soviets bore the Communists to power in October 1917, but sometimes then turned against them as the Communists’ authoritarianism became more pronounced. Without such explanation, it is difficult for the reader to understand why in 1921 the Kronstadt sailors should call for ‘Soviets to be elected without Communists’ (p. 318). It is easy and perhaps unfair to single out errors, which are more or less inevitable in a survey of a whole country’s history. This book has considerable virtues. Readers will find it reliable and on the whole clear and well laid out. Given the author’s abstinence from overt interpretation, though, I suspect they will use it more as a reference work than as a source of understanding on Russia’s historical development. UCL SSEES Geoffrey Hosking Platt, Kevin M. F. Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2011. xi + 294 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00: £29.50. Terror and Greatness is a cultural journey across two centuries of Russian myth-making about Tsars Ivan IV and Peter I. Based on historical, literary and visual sources, Kevin Platt explores how Russian intellectuals, living in diverse eras and circumstances, struggled to come to terms with two of Russia’s most emblematic and problematic monarchs. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, as they came to be called, represented distinct dynasties and ruled in very different historical conditions. Yet because of the dramatic events associated with their reigns, generations of intellectuals have viewed both rulers as symbols of the state-society relationship that occupies so central a place in modern Russian historiography. Specifically, the reigns of Ivan and Peter highlight the problem of tyranny and the role of coercion in achieving progressive change. Platt’s goal is to explore how Russian intellectuals employing different modes of cultural expression celebrated the accomplishments of Ivan and Peter — their commitment to reforms that strengthened the Russian state and promoted social progress — while also condemning their bloody methods. The result has been a malleable historical narrative that serves as the foundation for a Russian collective identity rooted in the memory of trauma and shared victimhood. REVIEWS 899 Platt moves back and forth between historiography, literature, theatre, painting and film in order to trace this collective memory of trauma. He begins in the early nineteenth century with historians N. M. Karamzin and N. G. Ustrialov and novelists I. I. Lazhechnikov and A. K. Tolstoi, commentators who echoed an official historiography that distinguished Peter’s heroic greatness from Ivan’s moral depravity and violence. In A. S. Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman (1833), a more ambiguous and intellectually compelling image of Peter appeared, one that continues to produce multiple interpretations within the larger thematic parameters of progress and violence. The ‘terror and greatness’ motif also occupied literary critic V. G. Belinskii and historians K. D. Kavelin and S. M. Solovev: all presented Ivan as a state builder and hence precursor to Peter. Slavophile thinkers of the same period took a more critical approach, condemning Peter’s methods and ‘achievements’ amid calls for a return to authentic national principles. The next phase of mythmaking covered by Platt is the era of the Great Reforms, a time when historians focused on Peter as a model for statesponsored social change, and playwrights, due to censorship restrictions, paid more attention to Ivan. Heart-wrenching treatments of intergenerational conflict, represented by the filicides of Tsareviches Ivan and Aleksei, also date from this period. Historians debated the necessity of Aleksei’s death without, however, abandoning the notion that state interests must override personal needs. Unwilling to excuse Peter’s methods, they nonetheless tended to view coercion as the handmaiden of progress. With respect to Tsar Ivan, works of...