Hacker News Reader

Comment by ruggeri | Hacker News Reader

He was an extremely active ruler. Founded the Russian navy, founded St. Petersburg. He was indeed also very interested in all kinds of science and technology and tried to import these to Russia.

https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Great-Robert-K-Massie-audiobook...

On the other hand, it seems that all the monarchs of this time basically treated their land as their inherited, God-given wealth. So in that respect, Peter and practically all others were extremely ego-centric and shallow. Modernization did not extend to democratization.

View on HN

There were still some substantial differences between Russian take on monarchy, and what was common in Western Europe at the time. While European monarchs claimed divine right to rule, the concept of subjects' rights was already developed by then, and not just in England; rulers required some legitimate justification for the more drastic actions. In Russia, in contrast, literally every person in the country was deemed a slave to the ruler, to be disposed of at will - a legacy it inherited from the Byzantines via the adoption of Eastern Orthodoxy, and later reinforced by Mongol customs during the occupation.

Yes, it's a contrast between Russian and Western monarchy that is commonly emphasized. It's a true difference.

But also no: learning more about this age made me realize that pre-Napoleonic Western Europe was even less liberal than I had expected. It is hard to learn about this age and not feel that policy was set entirely by and for the benefit of a small clique that held the levers of power.

Certainly some Western monarchies had more liberal pretensions than others. England of course is the prototypical example, and probably was the most liberal in practice. But it was a pretty big outlier amongst Western monarchies.

Learning more about Charles XII (Sweden), Augustus II (Saxony and Poland), Louis XIV (France): which one of these considered the suffering of the common people when they embarked on their wars of conquest and personal aggrandizement? Consider also how readily nobles traded realms when a larger or more prosperous fief came along. It's hard not conclude that these rulers treated their states as nothing more than inherited estates, to use and dispose of as they wished.

Comparing France, Spain, Austria to Peter's Russia: how much more liberal were these Western states?

Oh, I'm not saying that it was liberal in the modern sense of the word. And yes, most of those subjects' rights that I'm talking about pertained mostly to the nobles and the educated classes - that was the big difference between Russia and, say, Austria, not so much the difference in the day to day lives of peasants (although wrt the latter, the difference is that things were actually getting worse in Russia at the time, as serfdom - already some of the harshest in Europe - became more and more like full-fledged chattel slavery; but that problem would peak later, not under Peter).

But the important thing that this did was to establish the concept of the rights of the subjects vis a vis their rulers, and the requirement for the latter to maintain the legitimacy of their rule. When liberal thought emerged much later, it built on those concepts, extending them to larger segments of the population. In Russia, this happened as well eventually, but much slower.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com