Richard Lourie: Ivan the Terrible vs. Peter the Great
[Richard Lourie is the author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”]
Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov recently gave an interview in Snob, the magazine he owns. He notes that when lecturing he always asks the audience to name the most effective manager of all Russian leaders in the last 500 years. Invariably, the answer is Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. But Peter and Ivan are more than effective managers; they represent enduring currents in Russian history.
If Prokhorov can give an interview in his own magazine, I suppose I can quote myself in my own column. In my novel “Zero Gravity,” a 1986 Cold War comedy, an eccentric Kremlinologist reduces “all Russian history to two basic rhythms, which he called the Ivan-the-Terrible contraction and the Peter-the-Great expansion. Russia was either closing in on itself, shunning the world, hating foreigners, purging the bad blood … or else it was expanding, reaching out for the fruits of the West, the fruits of science, which, as bad luck would have it, grew best on the tree of liberty.”
Though that was written tongue in cheek, I find it helps me now in trying to understand the stream of highly disparate events occurring in Russia. Both tendencies are at work and at war with one another, a sharp contradiction as the Marxists were fond of saying. Though that contradiction is part of Russia’s internal dynamic, external forces are also deeply involved. The rise of China is pushing Russia to the West, as is the need to modernize the economy. The power elite created under Vladimir Putin is in no hurry, however, to embrace the West. That means change and risk. They were the beneficiaries of the last upheaval. There’s no guarantee they would fare so well in the next round.
But in Russia there are contradictions within contradictions, and so overly simple generalizations must also be avoided...
Read entire article at Moscow Times
Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov recently gave an interview in Snob, the magazine he owns. He notes that when lecturing he always asks the audience to name the most effective manager of all Russian leaders in the last 500 years. Invariably, the answer is Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. But Peter and Ivan are more than effective managers; they represent enduring currents in Russian history.
If Prokhorov can give an interview in his own magazine, I suppose I can quote myself in my own column. In my novel “Zero Gravity,” a 1986 Cold War comedy, an eccentric Kremlinologist reduces “all Russian history to two basic rhythms, which he called the Ivan-the-Terrible contraction and the Peter-the-Great expansion. Russia was either closing in on itself, shunning the world, hating foreigners, purging the bad blood … or else it was expanding, reaching out for the fruits of the West, the fruits of science, which, as bad luck would have it, grew best on the tree of liberty.”
Though that was written tongue in cheek, I find it helps me now in trying to understand the stream of highly disparate events occurring in Russia. Both tendencies are at work and at war with one another, a sharp contradiction as the Marxists were fond of saying. Though that contradiction is part of Russia’s internal dynamic, external forces are also deeply involved. The rise of China is pushing Russia to the West, as is the need to modernize the economy. The power elite created under Vladimir Putin is in no hurry, however, to embrace the West. That means change and risk. They were the beneficiaries of the last upheaval. There’s no guarantee they would fare so well in the next round.
But in Russia there are contradictions within contradictions, and so overly simple generalizations must also be avoided...