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When Bruce McIntosh coined the term spoiled child syndrome in the 1980s he did not mention Peter the Great, but this was probably just an oversight. His description fits no one better than Peter. It is certainly no surprise that Peter developed some serious psychoses. Combine an upbringing where someone is taught that they have a God given right to anything they want with some very extreme trauma (the blood bath following the first Streltsy revolt) and you are not likely to end up with a well-balanced individual. Feed any latent paranoia with a host of people who really are out to `get' him and no one could be surprised if you get some psychopathic behavior.
Peter was no psychopath; long term planning is not a characteristic associated with psychopaths and it is very much a defining feature of Peter's rule as Tsar. Nevertheless, he had no respect for human life and no apparent feelings of remorse. Happily sacrificing any number of lives for his pleasures and games, not caring how much suffering was caused and only regretting deaths in the way a small child would regret the loss of a toy.
It is easy to respect Peter's achievements, modernizing Russia, building St Petersburg and holding the state together despite considerable internal and external pressures, but can you love such a monster? Robert Massie certainly seems to and he has set out to make us feel a similar level of empathy. In much the same way that Jeff Lindsay wants us to love Dexter, George MacDonald Fraser wants us to love Flashman and (perhaps) Thomas Harris wants us to love Hannibal Lecter. It says a lot about Mr Massie's writing skill that he largely succeeded in winning me over, without hiding any of Peter's failings and excesses.Read more ›
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"Peter the Great" is a massive achievement which will not only create for the reader a full-bodied, balanced portrait of the tzar but also an intimate portrait of seventeenth century Russia, where rank on any level was paramount, where women were subservient to their husbands, ill-educated and treated like chattels; where jealousy, spite, murder and mayhem were alive and well. This splendid biography describes so eloquently the colorful wooden buildings clustered cheek by jowl in what is now Red Square; the magnificent onion-topped cathedrals; Russia in the snow where whiteness met the sky; the strident sounds of Russia from hawkers in the markets to magnificent voices raised in harmony in cathedrals. Huge Russia and the Europe of the seventeenth century are delivered to you as a many- coursed feast and you're transported from the palaces of the tzars to the humblest peasant hearth, to the battlefield, to the shipyards, to London, to Amsterdam, to Paris and above all, to Saint Petersburg the city Peter built.
In a biography, it's the characterizations of people that intrigue me the most. Several other reviewers have given excellent summaries of the book so I'll digress a bit to discuss Peter. What was Peter like? What did he look like? To begin with, he was an astonishing six feet eight in height which meant he towered over everybody. His shoulders were sloped, his hands and feet remarkably small. His hair was dark chestnut and he seldom wore a wig. His eyes were a deep brown, his face round and he sported a small mustache. On his right cheek was a wart. Massie calls him "almost handsome." He suffered from a tic on the left side of his face which could appear when he was stressed and was sometimes violent enough to include his left arm which thrashed around.Read more ›
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A grudging five stars because sometimes Massie seems ready to swamp us in details, to want to tell us everything he and his research team have uncovered for, say, campaign after campaign in the war of the moment - for Peter seemed always off on one war or another, with the Turks, the Swedes, the Poles, the Walachians, the Crimean Tatars, and on and on - giving us the names of each general commanding which brigades and assaulting that particularly wobbly center of gravity in the enemy line, at which point the story becomes one damn thing after another, threatening to bog down an almost 900 page text and prompting a pinch-eyed scream to, "Get on with it, man." (But please don't misunderstand: the battles are for the most part handsomely, impressively rendered, and Massie seems for the most part careful to raise those names that have downstream narrative significance - he's skilled at marshaling large amounts of information, although I sometimes spot-checked and found him relying for long stretches of a chapter on a single secondary source, and I continue to wonder what scholarly specialists in the period might think. I did not perform that particular due diligence.)
But nonetheless five stars, because Massie delivers mightily on the title, which is always a contract with the reader. Here, he satisfies every term, for we learn 1. why Peter was great; 2.Read more ›
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This item: Peter the Great: His Life and World (Modern Library)
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