In 1730, the grandson of Peter the Great, Emperor Peter II, died. The male line of the Romanov dynasty came to an end. Peter's daughter Elizabeth, who ascended the throne in 1741, decided to make his grandson, her sister's son, her successor. He belonged in the male line to the Holstein-Gottorp dynasty. In December 1761, he ascended the throne under the name of Peter III. All subsequent Russian tsars are considered his descendants. The era of Holstein-Gottorp began in Russia.
Another Holstein-Gottorp line ruled in Sweden. In the case of the childlessness of Peter III, it was she who would have preferential rights to the Russian crown. And Peter III himself was the great-nephew of the Swedish king Charles XII. Dexterous people tried to serve the current and future rulers. And what can a historian do?
Peter III, founder of the Holstein-Gottorp dynasty on the royal throne of Russia.
Norman myth about the beginning of Russia
Gerhard Friedrich Miller (1705-1783) was invited to St. Petersburg from Germany and in 1732 became an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His task was to find and study the ancient Russian chronicles. At the same time, Miller himself practically did not know Russian. He not so much researched as distorted Russian history.
In 1749 Miller compiled a report for the Academy "On the origin of the people and the name of the Russian people." It was the first to set forth the concept that the Russian state was founded by the Scandinavians. The report was thoroughly criticized by Mikhail Lomonosov and was banned from publication. However, the legend took root. Miller was particularly supported by Catherine II.
At the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, August Schlözer, also a St. Petersburg academician, wrote about the Scandinavian origin of Rus as an undoubted fact. From here, the Norman version was uncritically taken into his "History of the Russian State" by the freemason Nikolai Karamzin, and with the blessing of the Tsar-Freemason Alexander I, it became official in Russia.
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Viktor Vasnetsov. The calling of the Vikings.
Until the 18th century, no one in Europe believed that Russia was founded by immigrants from Scandinavia. At the beginning of the 16th century, the ambassador of the Austrian emperor in Moscow, Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, wrote in Notes on Muscovite Affairs that the Vikings, led by Rurik, were Slavs from the southern coast of the Baltic. He called their homeland in the Germanized Schleswig - the region of Wagriya. The Slavic origins of Rurik, Varangians and Rus were taken for granted in medieval Europe.
The myth of the Mongol yoke in Russia
Another historiographic myth to which Karamzin gave the force of dogma was the "Mongol-Tatar yoke" over Russia, which allegedly gravitated for almost two and a half centuries. The concept itself was not new at the time. The word "yoke" in the description of the relations between Russia and the Tatars was first used by the Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosh at the end of the 15th century. It is characteristic that no information about any "yoke" is known from Russian sources.
When Karamzin wrote his "History", the German compiler of the atlas of world history Christian Kruse first used the phrase "Mongol-Tatar yoke" (1817). Although Karamzin did not know him yet (he speaks of the "yoke of the Tatar," "the yoke of the infidels," etc.), after Karamzin it firmly entered the lexicon of Russian historians. First of all, thanks to Karamzin, since he painted this time as a foreign oppression over Russia.
Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin.
Much has already been written to refute the dominant concept; there is no need to repeat all this here. We will only note that the khan of the Golden Horde in Russia was called tsar, that is, the supreme secular ruler. The concept and meaning that was previously attached to the emperor of Byzantium was transferred to it. Is it appropriate to speak, in this case, about the Byzantine yoke in Russia in the XI-XII centuries?
The Russian metropolitan possessed no less power and importance than any Russian prince. During the so-called yoke, his influence increased even more. But the metropolitan in Russia continued to be supplied by the Patriarch of Constantinople. And whose “yoke” was it then?
The Russian princes brought against each other the steppe nomads who ravaged Russian cities, and the previously notorious invasion of Batu. For a long time the princes did not have a permanent arbiter who could resolve their disputes. They finally found such a person in the person of the strong khan of the Golden Horde. It should be noted that the frequency of the steppe invasions of Russia, if calculated from the chronicles, since the time of the "Batu invasion" has decreased compared to the times of Kievan Rus.
The Golden Horde of that time was an advanced state that absorbed many of the achievements of the education and citizenship of the East. The orientation of the Russian lands towards this world empire was a natural civilizational choice. The myth of the "Mongol-Tatar" yoke was launched in order to belittle the historical significance of Russia, to inspire the Russians with the idea that all the best can come only from Europe. And Russia without European influence is the essence of the "dirty Asian Horde". It is not for nothing that Hitler's Nazis raised this myth above all else.
The myth of Ivan the Terrible
In the official opus of Karamzin, Tsar Ivan IV acquired the features of a pathologically cruel tyrant, who in vain shed the blood of thousands of his subjects and even found some kind of sadistic pleasure in cruel executions. Indicative are the sources that Karamzin used (he refers to them in the notes) to create such a portrait of the king. This is just one (out of many dozens!) Russian chronicles - Pskov, and the work of some Germans Taube and Kruse, who allegedly served in Oprichnina and then published in Europe a sensational book telling about the cruelty of the Moscow Tsar.
The only lifetime portrait of the Russian Tsar Ivan IV.
Other sources were attracted by Karamzin only insofar as they helped in portraying Ivan the Terrible as an extravagant despot. Such, for example, is the work of Giles Fletcher "On the Russian State", which Karamzin had the opportunity to read in English. It should be noted that Fletcher's book was banned by the English parliament in the 17th century because of slandering a friendly state (that is, Russia), and Fletcher himself first arrived in Russia after the death of Ivan the Terrible, that is, after all the horrors he wrote about with such "knowledge of the matter."
The title page of Fletcher's libelous book on Russia.
Meanwhile, the source of the myth of Ivan the Terrible's bloodlust is well known. This is a traveling printing house of the Polish king Stefan Batory, who waged a war with Russia in 1577-1582. Stefan Batory was one of the first to realize the significance of the propaganda war. In the printing house under his army, numerous works were printed in which the atrocities of the Russian Tsar, as well as the cruelties of the Russian army in Poland and Livonia, were invented. These pamphlets and proclamations were then distributed in large numbers throughout Europe, forming a corresponding public mood. Appeals to the Russian people were also published there, urging them to betray the cruel tsar and go over to the side of the Poles.
The capture of Polotsk by Stefan Bathory in 1579. Drawing by the French artist Gavigny.
But the hostile political myth of the 16th century about the tyrant Ivan the Terrible - the tsar who actually laid the foundations of the Russian state by joining the entire Volga region to it, who began the conquest of Siberia, who tried to open a "window to Europe" to the Baltic Sea - is now considered, thanks to the efforts of the freemason Karamzin, the only one " a serious point of view”in historiography.
The myth of Peter the Great
Let's recall what was said at the beginning of the article about the royal dynasty of Holstein-Gottorp. After the suppression of the male line of the Romanov dynasty, there were two rival lines that continued it along the female line. One of them, as already mentioned. Holstein-Gottorp, dating back to Peter I through his daughters. The other is Braunschweig-Luneburgs, dating back to Ivan V (1682-1696), brother and co-ruler of Peter I.
Russian Tsar Ivan V. Unknown artist of the late 17th century.
Empress Anna Ioannovna (1730-1740), daughter of Ivan V, dying, bequeathed the throne to the baby-grandson of her sister Catherine under the regency of his mother Anna Leopoldovna, who was married to Duke Anton of Braunschweig-Luneburg. This child, Emperor Ivan VI, with his adult nannies, was overthrown in 1741 by the daughter of Peter I, Elizabeth, and in 1764, under Catherine II, at the age of 24, was killed in prison.
With the accession of Elizabeth Petrovna, the glorification of the role of Peter the Great in the history of Russia began. Along the way, his brother Ivan V was humiliated. The latter was denounced as feeble-minded. The facts of the insanity of Peter I himself were carefully hidden.
All-Russian Empress Elizabeth (1741-1761).
The main creator of the legend about Peter the Great was the historiographer Pyotr Kryokshin (1684-1763). In 1742 he presented to the Empress the first volume of his essay "A Brief Description of the Blessed Deeds of the Great Sovereign Emperor Peter the Great, Autocrat of All Russia." Elizaveta ordered Kryokshin to continue his endeavor, graciously allowed him to use the papers of the Cabinet of Peter I, and assigned a generous pension to the historiographer.
Before his death, Kryokshin wrote 45 volumes of the "Journal of Great Affairs" of Peter the Great in chronicle form. In addition, he published a condensed summary of them in "History of Russia and the Glorious Deeds of Emperor Peter the Great." The latter work, despite its criticism by contemporaries, who even then considered it fabulous, still serves as the source of the legend about the "glorious deeds" of the tsar-reformer. This, for example, is still in all seriousness taught in Russian military schools a fable about how Peter, during the siege of Narva in 1704, allegedly changed part of his regiments into Swedish uniforms and, thanks to this, won a victory.
Russian Tsar Peter I. Flemish artist Anthony Shunyans, 1716
Catherine II came to power and was kept only by the authority of the heir to her throne, the great-grandson of Peter I Paul. Therefore, she encouraged the line to praise Peter the Great. She rewarded Kryokshin with land holdings in the Moscow region, where one of the villages still bears his name.
This is how the myth was created that by the end of the 17th century Russia was almost on the edge of the abyss, and only the genius of Peter brought her out of the crisis and laid the foundation for her greatness.
Meanwhile, it is easy to be convinced that the majority of cases attributed to Peter were started by his predecessors.
Regular army
Regiments of the new system with the use of foreign officers began to be created under Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov. Alexei Mikhailovich was the first to introduce recruitment kits into the army. During the Crimean campaigns of Vasily Golitsyn under Princess Sophia (1687 and 1689), the regiments of the new system accounted for 80% of the Russian army. In the first years of the independent reign of Peter, their share fell below half (the Azov campaigns of 1695 and 1696)
Techniques for handling a musket. Drawing from the first military regulations in Russia & quot; Teaching and cunning of the military structure of infantry people & quot; (1647) - translation of a book by the Dutch military specialist Johan Walhäusen.
Fleet
The first ship for the Russian fleet was purchased from Holstein in 1636 ("Frederick"). In 1667, the ship Eagle was built on the Caspian Sea (burned by Razin's rebels in 1670). During the war with Sweden 1656-1661. and the occupation of a part of the Baltic by the order of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the city of Tsarevichev-Dmitriev (now Koknese) was founded on the Western Dvina, and the construction of ships of the future Baltic Fleet began there. The defeat in the war forced the Russians to cede the city, along with the shipyards and unfinished ships, to the Swedes.
Nizhny Novgorod with the ship * Frederic * in front of him, 1636 Unknown artist.
Introduction to European culture
The first higher educational institution in Russia - the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy - was opened in Moscow by the order of Tsar Feodor Alekseevich in 1679. The first Russian newspaper "Courants" began to appear in Moscow in 1676. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1645-1676) opened the first court theater in Russia. Under his son Theodore (1676-1682), at the Russian court, European (Polish) fashions were introduced into clothing.
At the same time, Peter's predecessors gradually borrowed useful things from Europe, did not chop down Russian traditions and did not overextend the country's efforts and resources.