TY - BOOK AU - Platt,Kevin M.F. TI - Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths SN - 9780801461439 AV - DK38 .P57 2016 U1 - 947.043072 23 PY - 2011///] CY - Ithaca, NY : PB - Cornell University Press, KW - History KW - Soviet & East European History KW - HISTORY / Russia & the Former Soviet Union KW - bisacsh KW - ivan the terrible, peter the great, nikolay karamzin, russian historical mythology, russian cultural history, russian political life, tsars N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Note on Transliteration --; Introduction. Toward a Cultural Historiography of Rus sia --; Chapter one. Liminality --; Chapter two. Trauma --; Chapter three. Filicide --; Chapter four. Prognostication --; Chapter five. Rehabilitation --; Chapter six. Repetition --; Conclusion: Redux --; Selected Bibliography --; Index; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great are the most vivid exemplars of this phenomenon in the pre-Soviet period. Both rulers have been alternately lionized for great achievements and despised for the extraordinary violence of their reigns. In many accounts, the balance of praise and condemnation remains unresolved; often the violence is simply repressed.Platt explores historical and cultural representations of the two rulers from the early nineteenth century to the present, as they shaped and served the changing dictates of Russian political life. Throughout, he shows how past representations exerted pressure on subsequent attempts to evaluate these liminal figures. In ever-changing and often counterposed treatments of the two, Russians have debated the relationship between greatness and terror in Russian political practice, while wrestling with the fact that the nation's collective selfhood has seemingly been forged only through shared, often self-inflicted trauma. Platt investigates the work of all the major historians, from Karamzin to the present, who wrote on Ivan and Peter. Yet he casts his net widely, and "historians" of the two tsars include poets, novelists, composers, and painters, giants of the opera stage, Party hacks, filmmakers, and Stalin himself. To this day the contradictory legacies of Ivan and Peter burden any attempt to come to terms with the nature of political power-past, present, future-in Russia UR - https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801460951 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780801460951 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780801460951/original ER -