How Peter the Great Sank in the Baltic Sea: Commemorating the First Seafaring Russian Emperor in Riga, Latvia (and Elsewhere)

In 1915, for fear of encroaching German armies, a monument to Peter the Great created by Berlin sculptor Gustav Shmidt-Cassel was removed from its pedestal in central Riga, present-day Latvia’s capital city, which the emperor had conquered in his quest for seaports in 1710. The monument was dispatched to Saint Petersburg for safekeeping, yet never arrived: the ship carrying it, the Serbino, was attacked and sunk by a German destroyer. And so the German equestrian monument to the Baltic conquests of Russia’s first seafaring emperor was itself lost at sea in the course of the war with Germany that brought both Latvian independence and the dissolution of the empire Peter built. If this were a dream, Freud would have described it as overdetermined. This lecture will spin out from this moment into consideration of historical myths and realities relating to Peter the Great and the water, the ports of the Russian Empire, the distinctions between sea-based and land-based empires, and those between capitalist and state socialist ones. We will touch on other monuments to Peter along the way, including Saint-Petersburg’s Bronze Horseman, the subject of Alexander Pushkin’s famous poem of that name, landlocked Moscow’s grotesque post-Soviet monument to Peter (a repurposed monument to Columbus), and the more recent fate of the Riga monument, that was recovered by Estonian divers in the 1930s, more recently reassembled, yet never reinstalled on any official pedestal in independent Riga.

Kevin M.F. Platt (Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania)

Brian Horowitz (Professor & Chair, Department of Jewish Studies, Tulane) will moderate