Testament of Tsar Peter the Great

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The will of Tsar Peter the Great is a powerful forged document that is supposed to prove the intention of Tsarist Russia to achieve military and political supremacy in Europe in the long term. Although there were already doubts about its authenticity when the text was published and the document could be proven beyond doubt as a forgery in 1870, both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler , among others, invoked propaganda during or in anticipation of their campaigns against Russia and the Soviet Union this document.

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In his alleged will, Tsar Peter the Great swore his successors in a meticulously defined plan to build Russia into the ruling power over the West and to subjugate all other European peoples. According to the will, it is the providence of the Russian people to exercise general rule over Europe in the future. To this end, wars should be incessantly waged in order to toughen up one's own army, constantly able officers and scientists should be recruited, conflicts fueled in Europe, Germany destabilized and bound to Russia through a marriage policy, Poland divided, Sweden subjugated, maritime sovereignty gained in the Baltic and Black Sea, the conquest of the Ottoman Empire carried out with the help of Austria, all Orthodox Christians of Southeast Europe brought under the roof of the Russian Church and the sphere of influence extended to Persia and India. France and Austria are supposed to be won against each other as allies, but secretly they are to be played off against each other through intrigues until the weakened victor comes under Russian rule. Prussia and the rest of the Holy Roman Empire were to be overrun by the Russian armies.

Authorship and propaganda use

According to historical research, the author of the document is believed to be Polish General Michał Sokolnicki . After the partition of Poland in 1794, the officer lived in Paris in exile and wanted to persuade the French to take military action against Russia, which had benefited in particular from the partition of Poland. He wrote the 14-point document towards the end of the 18th century and handed it over to the French Directory in 1797 , which was skeptical of the text. His plan did not work until 1812, when Napoleon justified his planned campaign against Russia with a slightly revised version of the document in a propaganda pamphlet from the French Foreign Ministry . As a result, it was even suspected that Napoleon himself was the author of the document.

In 1836, however, the popular French writer Frédéric Gaillardet claimed that he had found a verbatim copy of the will. It allegedly came from the estate of a personal confidante of King Louis XV. , who was said to have been given permission to rummage unsupervised through the most secret Russian palace archives on a trip to Russia and found the will. After the publication by Gaillardet, the document found widespread use and became better known.

As a result, the alleged will was repeatedly instrumentalized politically against Russia. So during the Russian-Turkish conflicts in the 1820s or during the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856, when Napoleon III. had the document posted as a poster in Paris. Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the contents of the will during the war when they were correspondents for the New York Daily Tribune . Engels reported, for example, that the English newspapers were organizing a journalistic crusade against the Ottoman Empire "to prepare the English public and the world for the moment when the most important decree of Peter the Great - the conquest of the Bosporus - becomes a fait accompli ." . Most of the recipients were probably aware that the will was not authentic.

But this was not seen as a reason not to instrumentalize the text anyway. In the Russophobic German pamphlet The Final Destination of Russia in 1916, the text with the sentence « Even forgeries can make history. And quite rightly, because the forgery characterizes Russia's politics better than some historical authenticated truth . " introduced.

On November 24 and 25, 1941, the text was massively exploited in the media by Joseph Goebbels as the “ Document of Russian megalomania” on the front pages of all German daily newspapers. Five months after the start of the German-Soviet War , the advance of the Wehrmacht stalled. Because of this, the propaganda efforts at home were pushed with all means and Goebbels ordered an anti-Russian lecture from the Berlin historian Wilhelm Schüssler , which cited the alleged testament of Peter the Great as evidence for his inflammatory theses and Hitler's decision to fight this "terrible threat" highly praised. Adolf Hitler himself wiped away objections to the authenticity of the text with the remark that " it doesn't matter what some professors have found out ". The decisive factor is that " Russian policy was conducted according to these principles as set out in the will ."

literature

  • Andreas Molitor: Russia rules in Europe .. ; In: Zeit Geschichte 3/2017. Fake. The power of lies . Propaganda, falsifications, conspiracy theories from the Middle Ages to the present day ; Pp. 34-37

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