Last time, we were too busy mourning to talk about the mechanics of Marx's assault on Peter. The thesis he used to unravel the tsar was that Peter's drive to modernization was really the result of the reaction against boyar fiscal inefficiency, and therefore Peter was not necessary for its realization, and therefore is not necessary in general. But Russia is always an odd duck - a bourgeois intelligentsia without a proper bourgeoisie, followed by a communist revolt against the industrial capitalist structure it equally didn't have. Peter fought with every nerve of his being against the tide of his country, and was almost entirely alone in the effort. It was less a question of a class finding a man to implement its will than a man making a class to carry out his own.

But perhaps that is taking the argument too closely. On a global scale, the economic pressure of the west would have eventually broken the back of the boyars, perhaps two hundred years later, but it would have happened, and it is perhaps by looking down from that platform that Marx summoned the material dialectic oomph to take out Peter.

On another note, this is the last episode that will launch before Geoff becomes a Married Chap! Onwards, to Matrimony!

- Count Dolby von Luckner