In 1933 Karol Szymanowski's concert tours took him to Moscow. Despite the obvious personal significance of this occasion, it was not one that Neuhaus documented either in his Autobiographical Notes or in his many articles. Scores of Russian musicians who met the Polish composer in the green room of the Moscow Conservatory's Grand Hall and the Polish embassy, however, left not only with impressions of the visiting Pole but also with a new epithet that Szymanowski had devised for his cousin. Neuhaus, who was now one of the most famous Russian pianists of his time, was hailed as “Heinrich the Great” (Genrikh Velikiy).

Szymanowski's reference carried with it the unmistakable overtones to Russia's tsar—Peter I, or from 1721, “Peter the Great”—who was famously acknowledged by his contemporaries as bringing the country from nothingness into being. Although this was a precarious implication to make in the postrevolutionary years where history was bent to a Stalinist ideology, Peter the Great was nonetheless widely recognized as the figure who had transformed Russia into a formidable power. It was widely accepted that a significant part of this transformation had been instigated by the tsar's keen desire to look outward to the West: notably Germany, but also beyond. The introduction of these Western outlooks to Russia had informed the core of his policies, ideas, and methods. More specifically though, for those thinkers who, like Szymanowski, were well-acquainted with the ideas of the emerging Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, Peter the Great carried great symbolic significance for the self-reflective autobiographical practices that sought to define an artist's worth through the imprint of his personality, or lichnost’, in his work. As the first “fully fledged” personality on Russian soil, Peter the Great had marked for this intelligentsia the beginning of a new modern Russia. Surely it was this escapist symbol—which once guided the intelligentsia of the sociopolitically backward Nicolaevan Russia to hope that their art would be the force to create a better world—that became so poignant to Szymanowski as he looked aghast upon Stalinist Russia.