Prince Petr Bagration’s Afterlives in Putin’s Russia

• In Event: Remembering 1812: Russian Empire-, Nation-, and State-Building across the Centuries

Abstract

A scion of the royal Georgian Bagrationi dynasty, Prince Petr Ivanovich Bagration (1765-1812) in his own day was memorialized by Gavrilla Derzhavin as “God of the Army.” Interestingly, the general who in 1812 had “taught Russians how to die for Rus’,” according to a contemporary admirer, has since been remembered variously. If in Vasilii Zhukovskii’s “The Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors” (1812) Bagration is celebrated as an exemplar of martial valor, early Soviet writers anathematized him and his gravesite suffered fate similar to that of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, until his memory was rehabilitated and mobilized in the context of World II. This paper examines the uses to which his memory has been put in Putin’s Russia, whether to market cognac or remind Russian commuters of the virtue of martial heroism and the glory of Russian arms.

Author

• Sean Pollock, Wright State U