Saviour or scourge?

John Evelyn, the diarist, was astonished that during his visit to England Peter the Great played a boisterous game of being pushed through a holly hedge in a wheelbarrow, with a very deleterious effect on the hedge. This minor incident encapsulates two sides of Peter that have led to a long discussion on his policies and their effect on Russia. Lindsey Hughes's work captures both the enigma of Peter and the complexity of the historical debate. It is essential reading for specialists in Russian history and the lucidity of her exposition makes her research easily accessible to a wider audience.

In Pushkin's famous poem "The Bronze Horseman" the grandiose plans and the historic achievement of "cutting a window through to Europe" are contrasted with the effects of these triumphs on the ordinary and insignificant clerk, Evgenii, whose world is destroyed and who goes mad. Pushkin brilliantly encapsulates the problem. What drove Peter to travel to Europe, to bring back western methods of naval construction and learning, to move his capital from Moscow and to inflict fundamental changes on Russian society with scant regard for attitudes and feelings? If these policies can be equated with a desire to reform and enlighten, how does that square with a way of life and drinking habits that scandalised Russians of a traditional outlook and western visitors and observers? Placing his first wife Evdokia in a nunnery - a traditional way of rulers ridding themselves of their spouses - and torturing his son Alexis to death show Peter in a far less pleasant light.

Many of Peter's reforms originated in two interrelated problems shared by most rulers: defence and the need to keep competing noble families subordinate to the crown. Peter's early years when his position may have seemed threatened by the Streltsy revolt and his half-sister Sophia, would have strengthened this perception, although, as Hughes argues, there is insufficient evidence to show clearly that Sophia was as scheming as some writers postulate. Military service was the raison d'etre of the nobility and nobles were required to register their sons for it. Peter's favoured regiments, the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky, recruited nobles and when baby sons were born to Peter they were referred to as recruits. Peter ordered that education was to be compulsory for the nobility. In 1696, the first contingent was sent abroad to study navigation and from 1714 all nobles were required to be educated between the ages of ten and 15. By enforcing the principle of service Peter appears to have wanted his subjects to work as tirelessly and energetically as he did. But these measures were very unpopular and "many nobles felt not only oppressed by compulsory service and education, forced transfer to St Petersburg and the law on single inheritance, but also humiliated".

Peter's reign was not the complete break with the past sometimes presented. Tentative steps towards westernisation were discernible during the reign of his father, Alexis. Part of Peter's youth had been spent in Moscow's foreign quarter where he was introduced to foreign ideas and where he could escape the oppressive traditions of the court. But under Peter the rate of change accelerated to an extraordinary degree. There was little outright organised rebellion but much resentment, which ranged from lack of enthusiasm for ideas of service to flight. In folklore, Peter has a more negative image than his predecessor Ivan IV (the Terrible) with whom comparisons are made. Ivan IV's reputation seems to rest on the fact that he attacked the boyars and not the people, whereas Peter began his reign by punishing the Streltsy, many of whom were Old Believers, went on to attack the church and to remove any vestiges of autonomy, subordinating it to the state. Peter demanded that the common people serve the state too and the demands on the serfs were very heavy. There were many rumours that Peter was anti-Christ, and that the real tsar had been replaced by a foreigner.

Arguments about the legacy of Peter the Great are best known in the context of the 19th-century debate been westernisers and Slavophiles. The Slavophiles idealised pre-Petrine Russia at a time when relations between social groups were more harmonious and society held together by faith and custom. Peter, it was argued, caused a gulf between the educated classes and the rest of the nation. This gulf was never bridged and was the root cause of the problems that dogged Russia. By contrast, westernisers considered that force was inevitable if Russia was to match the West in military and economic terms. Peter's reforms were essential and allowed the emergence of rationality and a new national consciousness. This debate is continued into the present with the contemporary historian Yevgeniy Anisimov arguing that Peter laid the basis for the command system of government that came to its full flowering under Stalin. He considers that Peter destroyed much of the basis of "civil society", especially by his subjugation of the church, and encouraged spying, denunciation and control. This kind of conclusion begs several historical questions. Many governments were authoritarian and autocratic in the early 18th century but did not become dictatorships 200 years later. The question of the rule of the church is extremely interesting in this context. Soviet historians have claimed that Peter secularised the state. This is not accurate. Some measures had been used against the church in the previous reign and the divisions between the Orthodox Church and the Old Believers had weakened the church very considerably. The pressure placed on Patriarch Nikon demonstrated that real power lay on the side of the secular authorities. Under Peter the church was subordinated to the state in order to do the state's bidding. Arguably the problem lay much deeper in the fact that the Orthodoxy, unlike Roman Catholicism, had not produced highly educated priests who could have challenged state power.

Despite the unpopularity of Peter's policies, he achieved much of which Russians became proud. St Petersburg came to symbolise Russian imperial power. The navy was created and the army strengthened, and the Academy of Sciences was founded as the crowning glory of his educational reforms. The ruling classes were introduced to western ideas, education and behaviour which in due course enabled Russia to produce a high culture to rival any in Europe. Peter also brought Russia out onto the European diplomatic stage and his military campaigns secured Russia's access to the Black Sea and the Baltic, access which had been lost since the Mongol invasions and which Russians regarded as theirs by right. Whether the Russians wish to see themselves primarily as part of Western Europe or whether they will seek their identity in their Slav and Orthodox roots, Peter the Great and his policies will continue to be a central point of reference. Anyone who wishes to understand these arguments will have to read this splendid book.

Catherine Andreyev is lecturer in modern European history, University of Oxford.