Sublime

Peter’s ‘symbolic reforms’ were meant to drive home the terrible urgency of political change. After his European tour in 1698, he imposed a ban on beards and personally cut off those of his leading nobles. Russian traditional dress – a loose robe or kaftan – was also outlawed, and ‘German dress’ was imposed.

Peter the Great understood that the survival of his regime depended upon membership of the European states system and the diplomatic leverage it could be used to secure – like his useful alliance with Denmark against Sweden. To be driven out of ‘political Europe’ by Poland or Sweden would have been a catastrophe.

Muscovy’s struggle to transform itself into a dynastic regime able to absorb the North Russian states, resist Poland–Lithuania and overawe the Volga khanates marked a decisive phase in the eventual emergence of Russia as the engine of Europe’s expansion into Northern Eurasia.

Like it or not, the grand dukes of Muscovy could survive only by entering the European diplomatic system (to seek allies against Poland) and (no less important) by competing on cultural and ideological terms with the new-style monarchies of fifteenth-century Europe. Much of later Russian history would turn on the delicate balance between the