This article accompanies the fable
From Russia with Love



The Bronze Horseman

If there is an iconic image of Russian imperial power and looking westward toward Europe, it is this enormous statue of Peter the Great, funded by his successor Catherine the Great, in Saint Petersburg.

Known as the Bronze Horseman, it famously was celebrated in a hallucinatory Pushkin poem and in this painting from 1870 by Vasily Ivanovich Surikov, which shows St. Isaac's Church in the background on a moonlit wintry night.

The statue - like city in which it stands - has provoked all sorts of ambivalence in Russian artists. Pushkin's poem set the tone: its poor hero is driven mad by the floods that menace the city, so he curses the statue, which comes to life and chases him down. Soon afterwards he is dead. Such a pessimistic and ambiguous message would not have been what Peter and Catherine had in mind. Propaganda can be reversed.