From Tsar to Emperor

No European ruler except Napoleon I has impressed both contemporise and later historians so profoundly as Peter I of Russia by the originality and the personal character of his achievements. Like Napoleon, Peter appeared to some observers, at least in his later years, as almost more than human. He seemed by his own unaided efforts to have changed the course of his country's and Europe's history.

Feofan Prokopovich, the most important official apologist and ideologist of Peter's last years, spoke of his am ‘resurrecting Russia as if from the dead', and compared him with various Old Testament heroes: like Samson he had given Russian adamantine strength; like Japhet he had created for he a fleet; like Moses he had given he laws and like Solomon dispensed wisdom to her. Another of Peter's collaborators, the young P.N. Krekshyn, prayed to him almost as to a god: ‘Our father Peter the Great! Thou broughtest us from nothingness into existence!' Foreign comment lacked this element of quasi-religious veneration, but could be almost equally fulsome. In 1724, the year before the Tsar's death, one English newspaper described him as ‘the greatest Monarch of our Age...whose Actions will draw after him a Blaze of Glory and Astonishment, through the latest Depth of Time! And warm the Heart of Posterity with the same generous Reverence for the Name of this immortal Emperor, which we now feel at Mention of Alexander the Great: or the first, and noblest of the Caesars'. As yet such a comment was too favourable to be typical...