Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/83

 when he decreed that from thirty to a hundred roubles should be paid for the privilege of wearing a beard.

Peter himself remained the barbarian. Still strong in him was the Old Russian Adam, the man who desired to become and was to become the new Adam of enlightenment and humaneness. Peter was the archetype of the transitional Russian of his time. Consider him in his later days as imperator, when, after conquering the Swedes, he publicly danced for joy upon the table, and was hailed by the applause of his people—was not this the act of a barbarian? But was the triumph of the Roman imperators or of the modern European conquerors one whit less barbaric, or in any essential greater, than Peter's frank display of jubilation? Peter, insists the modern European, was barbarian pure and simple. Look at the way in which he personally applied the rack to those sentenced by him; look at the way in which he played the executioner upon his victims! Consider his treatment of his first wife and his dealings with his son Alexis! Agreed. Peter was a barbarian. I make no excuses for him, and apply the term to him in its most literal signification. But I do not for that reason esteem more highly the French or Spanish "culture" of a Ferdinand or a Louis, of the men whose nerves were not strong enough to undertake the immediate supervision of the dragonnades, the inquisitional barbarities, and the various other acts of inhumanity, for which they were none the less personally responsible. These refined barbarians kept hired consciences and executants to do their dirty work.

The lollies and base frivolities of his drunken assemblies, wherein Peter would make fun of the papacy with an oblique aim at the patriarchate, were in part connected with his work as reformer, for the frank barbarian was in truth ingenious in such arts. Peter displayed something stronger than cunning, both in his doings at home and in his relationships with the foreign world. To cite but one instance among many, how keen was the calculation with which he appointed his ecclesiastical opponent Javorskii to be president of the synod.

OLITICALLY and socially, Peter's reforms, taken in conjunction with the success of his policy of conquest, signified the strengthening of absolutism. When at