MOSCOW – On the 350th anniversary of the birth of Peter I, known as the Great, the Russian president Vladimir Putin drew a disturbing parallel. “It’s amazing, but almost nothing has changed,” she said after opening at the exhibition center Vdnkh an exhibition on the man who reigned, first as tsar, and then as emperor, for 43 years until his death in 1725 and who gave his name to a new capital, St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown, which he built on the land that he had snatched from Sweden.
“Peter the Great led the Great Northern War for 21 years. He seemed to be taking something away from Sweden. He was taking nothing away from her. He was regaining control,” the Kremlin leader said while meeting a group of young entrepreneurs. “When he founded a new capital, none of the European countries recognized this territory as belonging to Russia. Everyone considered it part of Sweden. But from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there together with the Finno-Ugric peoples. ) and strengthening (the country).
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It is also up to us to take back and strengthen. There is no intermediate state. A country is either a sovereign or a colony, “he said in a veiled reference to the Russian offensive in Ukraine.” Putin likes strong leaders, “commented Andrej Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.” He wants to be seen as a modernizer like Peter, even if he will go down in history as a cruel governor more like Ivan the Terrible “.
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The comparison with Peter the Great, the tsar who worked to bring Russia closer to Europe, clashes even more in the midst of the rupture of relations between Moscow and the West due to the so-called “special military operation”. Teasing “memes” abound on Russian social networks for days, photos accompanied by ironic phrases. “Peter the Great has opened a window on Europe, Putin has closed it”, is the most popular. While another cartoon depicts the emperor saying: “Close the window on Europe, the view is terrible”.
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So much so that Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov last week had to intervene to ensure that “no one is going to close anything”. Even Putin, while admitting the difficulty of circumventing Western sanctions, reiterated: “We will not make the mistake of the USSR. Our economy will remain open. It is impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia”. Words that Yandex.Maps, the “Russian Google” map service, seems to have taken literally: it has erased all borders between countries.