2023-08-29 21:43:00
Pope Francis was once again involved in an international dispute by praising the heritage of “great Russia” In a speech in which he evoked the figures of the tsars Peter I “the Great” and Catherine II “the Great”: the Ukrainian government responded harshly to the Vatican, saying that the pontiff’s language was “very unfortunate”, considering the apparent eagerness imperialists of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his desire to become the new Peter the Great.
“They are children of the great Russia, of great saints, of kings, of Peter the Great, of Catherine II, of a Russian people of great culture and great humanity”, Pope Francis told a group of young people gathered in a St. Petersburg church. The two monarchs expanded Russia into a huge empire in the 17th and 18th centuries, including conquering parts of Ukraine, and President Putin invokes his legacies in justifying his invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territory last year.
Peter I (1672-1725)
Pope Francis praised the heritage of the “great Mother Russia” and generated the repudiation of Ukraine
The spokesman for Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Oleg Nikolenkocriticized the Pope saying: “It is with this kind of imperialist propaganda (…) that the Kremlin justifies the murder of thousands of Ukrainians and the destruction of hundreds of Ukrainian cities and towns.” “It is very regrettable that Russian ideas of great power, which are, in fact, the cause of Russia’s chronic aggressiveness, consciously or unconsciously come out of the mouth of the pope, whose mission, in our understanding, is precisely to open the eyes of the Russian youth to the destructive course of the current Russian leaders”.
He spokesman of the Vatican, Matteo Bruni, defended Pope Francis’ comments, saying they were intended to “encourage young Russians to preserve and promote what is positive in Russia’s great cultural and spiritual heritage.” “And certainly not glorify imperialist rationales and government personalities,” she clarified.
Ukraine’s anger is mainly focused on the fact that Vladimir Putin, who has been at war with that country for a year and seven months, was compared publicly and in innumerable opportunities with the Tsar Peter I, drawing a parallel between what he described as his two historical twin quests to recapture the Russian territories.
Vladimir Putin
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“Peter the Great fought the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, which took something from them. But he didn’t take anything from them, he took back [lo que era de Rusia]”said Putin, who has a long history of praising leaders who share his own views, including Czar Alexander II and pre-revolutionary Prime Minister Piotr Stolypin.
The Great Northern War was a conflict between Russia and Sweden that spanned more than two decades, between 1700 and 1721. In coalition with Denmark, Norway, and Lithuania, the tsar successfully challenged Sweden’s dominance in the north, center, and east of Europe. By defeating the Swedes, Peter I made Russia a leading regional power and a major player in European affairs.
“Apparently, we also had to recover and strengthen (the country). And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will surely succeed in solving the tasks we set ourselves,” Putin concluded, describing the emperor as “an outstanding statesman, military leader, and patriot, (who) dedicated his entire life to serving the Fatherland.”
The tsar who “opened the window to Europe”…
Inspired by time spent abroad, Pedro I (born 1672) went to great lengths to modernize his vast and underdeveloped nation during his rule from 1682 to 1725. He was an autocratic modernizer, ruthless towards his opponents (including his own son), and admired by both liberal and conservative Russians.
The most famous of the tsar’s efforts to modernize the country and get it out of the medieval religious obscurantism in which he saw it submerged was to build the city of Saint Petersburg on territory that had conquered Sweden. A project that cost the lives of tens of thousands of workers, recruited as forced laborers to build the “window to europe” by Pedro I.
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During his reign, the Tsar of the Romanov Dynasty implemented extensive political, military, and social reforms aimed at westernizing Russia, transforming the country into a naval power, and vastly expanding its territory. But he too tolerated little dissent and brutally put down an uprising in 1698. publicly torturing and executing more than 1,000 rebels.
Peter’s measures to modernize Russia included imposing Western dress and banning the Russian elite from wearing beards, taxing almost everything, taking over the Russian church, subjugating the nobility, and import of new technologies, services and professionals from Europe.
Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of several books on the Romanov dynasty, believes that successive Russian leaders up to Putin tried to emulate Peter the Great: “Every Romanov Tsar, every Soviet leader, and here Putin, dreams of being the first emperor to become a statesman, a conquering general, a builder and a reformer.” wrote.
And the president who closed the doors of Russia
Born in Saint Petersburg, where Peter I is a local cult figure, Putin came to power with the ambition of reincarnating the tsar: the oligarchs that surrounded him appropriated Western fashions, technologies and lifestyles. On the other hand, he believed that his mission was to restore the geographical dimensions of the old empire, and to reposition Russia in the global sphere of influence after the fall of the USSR.
but failed. Amid rising tension between the West and Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow began downplaying Peter I’s affinity with Europe and focused on his territorial expansionism. And while with the construction of Saint Petersburg Peter I opened the window to Europe in the Baltic, Putin closed the gates of Russia and the borders with Western Europe with his war with Ukraine.
The conflict unleashed by Putin to “take back” what he believes to be his has left his country more isolated from the West than at almost any time in its history. Flights to the EU were banned, sanctions prevented Russians from accessing Western imports and Western retailers such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, H&M y ZaraThey closed their doors. Putin’s absence from international summits is a thunderous example of the isolation to which he submitted.
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Putin, a former Soviet secret police (KGB) officer in East Germany, lived through the end of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” he said. All this fueled in the current Russian president a desire for revenge, targeting Ukraine: in 2008, according to the Russian and American press, Putin assured his American counterpart George W. Bush that that “not a state”.
In July 2021 Putin assured that “russians and ukrainians are one nation” that belongs to “the same historical and spiritual space” and, six months later, affirmed that Ukraine had been “created by Lenin” in the early years of the Soviet Union. Under this logic, Putin opened a war that “does not constitute not an attack on Ukraine, but a release of the Ukrainian people from the foreign occupier”, as he analyzed Tatiana Stanovaia, director of the Russian study center R. Politik.
“Putin has been taking off a lot of masks; what he is revealing quite consistently is Russia’s new imperial ambitions,” he said. Rory Finnin, Professor of Ukrainian Studies at Cambridge University. “Russia’s war against Ukraine is now clearly a war of imperial conquest,” he added.
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Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister of Swedenwas among those who warned years ago that Putin has an uncontrollable desire for years of bloodshed: “That’s how he sees his mission: to take back what was once claimed by Russia. It’s a recipe for years of war.”said.
Inside the walls of the Kremlin, where an imperial protocol from Romanov times reigns, the life of the Russian leader is surrounded by mystery, mistrust, intrigue and real fears of assassination or coup: his absence from the great forums of leaders internationals is deafening and in his official audiences he usually appears separated from his interlocutors by extraordinarily long tables.
If Putin managed to resemble Pedro in something, it is that neither had the capacity to institutionalize the succession of leadership. Peter I killed his own son and heir, Tsarevich Alexis, accusing him of conspiring against him to seize power. Since the tsar’s death in 1725, the reign of every Russian monarch has ended in coup, assassination or revolution, while the current Russian president seems to have smothered any chance of his future peaceful replacement.
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