Peter the Great's Will and London
I have recently been researching an article on the supposed "Testament of Peter the Great". For the uninitiated, this is a famous example of a 'political fake': the supposed will left by Russian Emperor Peter I (1672-1725), including commandments to his successors to expand Russian power over her neighbours; in some versions, it was expanded to include an exhortation to world domination:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_of_Peter_the_Great
The "Testament" has long been known to be a fake. The evidence for this is partly anachronistic language (e.g. references to 'Germany' at a time when this nation-state did not exist), and partly the fact that no such document was ever found, despite free access to the archives of Tsarist Russia. This has not stopped it from being dug up whenever anti-Russian propaganda requires it, including by Germans during both World Wars; by both Napoleons (the First, during his 1812 invasion of Russia, and the Third during the Crimean War); and by Harry Truman during the Cold War.
The Atlantic magazine published what it claimed to be the full version of the Testament in 1877, citing it as evidence of Russia's plans in its ongoing tensions with the Ottoman Empire:
Around the same time, though, scholars began to investigate the supposed will, and soon judged it a fake. Here are a couple of articles, by Lucian Lewitter and Albert Resis, charting the history of the research and the probable origin of the fake:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25776358?seq=9
Before then, though, the "Will" was regularly cited in the British press. A search of the archives (via Gale Primary Sources) shows a spike in references in the lead-up to the Crimean War of 1854-56. For example, the Morning Chronicle of Mar 23, 1854, printed what it claimed was the full document:
One avid reader of the Morning Chronicle, who also regularly referred to the 'Testament', was Karl Marx. He also frequently read the Standard, which ran a very florid article on February 10, 1854. I will present the whole article in another post, but for now let us mention that it includes a reference to "Peter the First's sacred legacy".
As a final twist, here are some extracts from an article titled "Peter the Great's Legacy" from the Sherborne Mercury (Tuesday, 16 January 1855):
Unfortunately, the public house in question (the Czar's Head, which was in Great Tower Street) does not exist now, having been destroyed in a German air-raid in 1940, which makes it impossible to check this 'heirloom'. Sarah Young gives some details of the former establishment in a very interesting article:
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/11/23/russians-in-london-peter-the-great/
