Russian popular eschatology and the legend of Peter the Great as antichrist

Abstract

The article examines the legend about Peter the Great as Antichrist, in the form in which it circulated during Peter’s lifetime. The author considers some of the ‘evidence’ that Peter was Antichrist: predictions that the world would end soon after 1666; the calculation that Peter was the eighth tsar of Muscovy (cf. the eight kings of the Apocalypse); that his name resembled that of Simon the Magician (Simon Petrov), the first precursor of the Antichrist; and that his policies, behaviour and appearance were Satanic. These ideas about Peter as Antichrist were derived from sources such as the prophetic books of the Bible, the writings of the Church fathers, and the Book of St Cyril of Jerusalem (1644). Some of the motifs of the legend of Peter as Antichrist resembled those of the legend that Peter was a ‘substituted’ tsar: both legends attempted to explain the strange nature of Peter’s Westernising innovations, but the Antichrist legend was more ‘intellectual’, based as it was on a profound knowledge by its advocates (Old Believers and others) of Holy Scripture and eschatological literature. Refs 21.