Russian President Vladimir Putin has honored the famous Tsar Peter the Great on his 350th birthday. He drew a parallel between what he described as a shared historical goal: “take back Russian land”.
“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years,” Putin said. “It seemed like he was at war with Sweden and took something away from them. But he took nothing from them. He took back what belonged to Russia,” he said in St. Petersburg after visiting an exhibition about Peter the Great.
See also: Putin visits exhibition Peter the Great
Later, on Russian television, he compared the current war in Ukraine with Peter the Great’s campaign in Sweden. “Apparently it is now up to us to take back what belongs to Russia and make the country stronger. And if we assume that these values are the foundation of our existence, we will certainly succeed.”
Justify
Putin has tried several times to justify his invasion of Ukraine by arguing that according to history Ukraine is not a separate state and has no national identity. In July last year, he published another essay entitled “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” In it, he argued that Russia and Ukraine were in fact one nation, which had been artificially split.
An autocratic innovator admired by both liberal and conservative Russians, Peter the Great ruled Russia for 43 years (1682-1725) and gave his name to a new capital, Saint Petersburg. He had the city, Putin’s birthplace, built on land he had conquered from Sweden. This mainly concerned marshland on the Baltic Sea coast. The project cost the lives of tens of thousands of serfs (read: forced labourers), but it did provide Peter with his desired “window to Europe”.
The Tsar succeeded in expanding the Russian Empire considerably, at the expense of Sweden and the Ottomans. He did this with a well-developed army and navy.
Strong leaders
Putin is known to admire strong leaders who share his conservative ideas, such as Tsar Alexander III (1845-1894). Leaders who detracted from the strong and unified state can count on less mercy. An example of this is Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, who is accused by Putin of founding Ukraine on historical Russian territory.
Putin assures there will be no new Iron Curtain: “We are not going to shut down our economy. We will not make that mistake again.”
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