Sublime

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.

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.

Christiaan Rudolf de Wet,

Peter’s famous incognito tours of shipyards in Holland were anticipated in the eagerness of earlier tsars to adopt the bureaucratic and diplomatic methods of the grander European monarchies. Russia’s rulers and churchmen drew on ideas of the magnificent and spiritual from the baroque art and architecture of Central Europe, and adapted them to local

Un officier de rang plus élevé, qui avait commencé sa carrière dans le renseignement à Dresde, en Allemagne de l’Est, une fois rapatrié en catastrophe puisqu’il n’y avait plus d’Allemagne de l’Est se retrouvait sans emploi, sans logement de fonction, réduit à faire le taxi sauvage dans sa ville natale, Leningrad, en maudissant les « nouveaux