The Establishment of Petrine-Pushkinian Russia: A Philosophical Perspective

Abstract

The Petrine-Pushkinian era lasted no more than two hundred years. It originated at the Battle of Poltava, where Russian troops first showed themselves not just equal to the Swedes, who were otherwise the best European troops at the time, but even surpassed them. Russia became a part of Europe. As both poets and historians (Fyodor Tyutchev, Vasilii Kliuchevskii) have said, Peter the Great’s empire rose in response to Charles the Great’s, just as Russian state power rose in response to its Roman-German counterparts. Peter declared Russia an empire in 1721, giving it both a supra-confessional and supranational idea, creating a legal framework, the first step toward freedom of man. Pushkin sang the work of Peter, imbuing the new capital, Petersburg, with a soul. This allowed Georgy Fedotov to call Pushkin a singer of both empire and freedom. The October Revolution of the 1917 and Civil War, that broke out in late 1917, served as the tragic end to the era.