“Peter the Great waged the great war of the north for 21 years. He seemed to be at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He took nothing from them, he returned [what was Russia’s]”Putin said on Thursday after visiting an exhibition dedicated to the Tsar. In televised comments on the 106th day of his war in Ukraine, he compared Peter’s campaign to Russia’s current military actions. “It simply came to our notice then [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values are the basis of our existence, we will certainly be able to solve the tasks we face. “ Putin, now in his 23rd year in power, has repeatedly tried to justify Russia’s actions in Ukraine, where his forces destroyed cities, killed thousands and forced millions to flee, proposing a view of history that Ukraine does not has a true national identity or tradition of the state. Peter the Great, an authoritarian modernist admired by liberals and conservative Russians, ruled for 43 years and named a new capital, St. Petersburg – Putin’s city – which he ordered to be built on land he had seized from Sweden. It was a project that cost the lives of tens of thousands of slaveholders, who were recruited as forced laborers to build Peter’s “window to Europe” in the swamps of the Baltic Sea. Prior to Putin’s visit to the show, state television aired a documentary praising Peter the Great as a tough military leader, significantly expanding Russian territory to the detriment of Sweden and the Ottoman Empire with its modern-day military. President Vladimir Putin, in the center, at the exhibition on the 350th anniversary of the birth of the first Russian emperor, Peter the Great, in Moscow. Photo: Sputnik / Reuters In recent years, Putin’s interest in Russian history has grown exponentially in public. In April 2020, as Russia entered its first lockdown on the coronavirus, it caused a stir in some areas when it compared the pandemic to the 9th-century nomadic Turkish invasions of medieval Russia during a televised speech to the nation. In July 2021, the Kremlin published a nearly 7,000-word essay by Putin entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” in which he argued that Russia and Ukraine were an artificially divided nation. It laid the groundwork for the deployment of its troops in Ukraine in February. Moscow has tried to justify its war in Ukraine by saying it was sending troops across the border to disarm and “search” for its neighbor, an unfounded allegation. Ahead of what Russia calls a “special military operation,” Putin has accused Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, of creating Ukraine on what Putin said was historically Russian territory and planting the seed of its final collapse. of the USSR. Instead, the Russian leader carefully praised Joseph Stalin for creating “a tightly centralized and fully united state,” although he acknowledged the history of “total” repression of the Soviet dictator. Putin has a history of praising leaders who share his own conservative views, including Tsar Alexander III and pre-revolutionary Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, both of whom have erected memorials in their honor across the country. Meanwhile, leaders seen as opposed to a strong, united Russian state – including Lenin and Nikita Khrushchev – have seen their contribution diminish. “Putin likes leaders he sees as tough, strong managers,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He wants to be seen as Peter [the Great]”A modernizer of style, although he will go down in history as a cruel ruler more like Ivan the Terrible.”
