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E-book The Bentham Brothers and Russia : The Imperial Russian Constitution and the St Petersburg Panopticon
In the eighteenth century Russia was a newcomer to the familiar concert of European nations, an exciting or worrying outsider among the established powers. In 1703 Tsar Peter Alekseevich, Peter I, the Great, founded a new city, St Petersburg, at the eastern end of the Baltic Sea. Thereby, in the famous words of Russia’s national poet Aleksandr Pushkin, he ‘chopped a window through to Europe’.1 Rus’, medieval Muscovite Russia, unified only in the fifteenth century under Grand Prince Ivan III, had developed as a successor state of the Mongol (‘Tatar’) empire of Chinggis Khan, part of the political configuration of the steppe lands of Eastern Europe and Central Asia: it conducted relations with Lithuania and Baltic powers, but played little active part in broader European affairs.2In the sixteenth century Tsar Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’, turned his attention to the west, and embarked on a campaign to seize control of Livonia, the eastern littoral of the Baltic. At the same time he welcomed foreign merchants – the English Muscovy Company, followed shortly by the Dutch – to engage in trade with Russia: their route lay through the new port of Archangel on the northerly ice-prone White Sea. However, the long Livonian War (1555–83) against the powerful Poles and Swedes ended in defeat for the Russians, and further warfare against Sweden and Poland culminated in the 1617 Treaty of Stolbovo and the 1618 Truce of Deulino, which shut Muscovy off from direct access to the Baltic for a century. Peter’s foundation of a new fortress, city and port on the western edge of the Muscovite state was therefore a statement of intent. It renewed Ivan IV’s westward advance (already initially re-begun under Peter’s father) and announced new visions: the Tsar’s intention to assert the might of his realm against long-standing opponents and make Russia a greater power; his love of the sea and wish to make Russia a maritime nation with a seaborne capacity similar to those of the western empires; and his desire to create a great Imperial residence which would rival the principal capitals of Europe – Paris, Vienna, Dresden, London. He had already attempted such a foundation on the Sea of Azov, by the Black Sea in the far south, on territory conquered from the Ottomans, looking south towards the Dardanelles and the Byzantine heritage of Russian Orthodoxy. But his ‘Petropolis’ at Azov was a costly failure which had to be abandoned in less than two decades.
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