TSAR PETER THE GREAT
DON’T FORGET TO MODERNISE
Peter was obsessed with the notion of Russia finally becoming a naval power. To this end he even became the first tsar to travel beyond Russia’s borders: his Grand Embassy of 9 March 1697 to 25 August 1698 was a diplomatic mission that saw him travel to both the Netherlands and England, the pre-eminent maritime nations of the time. In London, between marvelling at parliament (although deciding that “English freedom is not appropriate” for Russia), he visited the royal dockyards at Deptford, studied how modern naval artillery was made and used at Woolwich Arsenal, and hired engineers who would be able to help him build his fleet. By the time of his death, Russia had a navy with 32 ships of the line and over 100 other vessels.
However, the point was precisely that Peter was looking for technologies, skills and even weapons that could effectively be bought ‘off the shelf’. Although he strived to make Russia look more modern, demanding that his nobles affected European dress and shave their beards, and hiring Italian and French architects to build his new capital of St Petersburg, he never seriously addressed the structural constraints that prevented Russia from developing. Too often, he was simply relying on what he could buy and copy from the West rather than build the kind of scientific and cultural capital to allow Russia to compete. Therefore Peter’s Russia – like Putin’s – was condemned always to lag behind the most modern technologies and forced to rely on quantity when it could not compete in technology.