Peter the Great

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter the Great stood over six feet tall in an era when most men barely reached his shoulder. Saint-Simon, who met him in 1717, described him as "tall, well-formed and slim... with a look both bewildered and fierce." Sophia of Hanover saw him at Coppenbrügge castle that same year and found him "well endowed by nature" but wishing he were "a little better mannered." These two portraits capture a man who defied easy summary: simultaneously a working shipwright in Dutch dockyards, a tsar who mocked the Church he was baptized into, and a ruler who believed the state could transform human beings through violence and fear. How did a boy who witnessed political murders from the Moscow palace window become the man who moved a capital city, founded a navy, and dragged Russia into the European order by force? The answers run through battlefields in Ukraine, Amsterdam sawmills, and the bladder surgery that preceded his death at fifty-two.

• 2. Childhood Under Siege

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  When Peter's father Alexis died in 1676, the succession passed first to the crippled Feodor III, leaving the young Peter educated at the Amusement Palace by tutors including Nikita Zotov, Patrick Gordon, and Paul Menesius. Feodor left no children when he died in 1682, and the resulting vacuum ignited a war between two rival clans: the Miloslavsky family, who backed Ivan, Alexis's son by his first wife, and the Naryshkin family, the clan of Peter's mother. The Boyar Duma chose the ten-year-old Peter as tsar, and to give his mother the power to advise him, a hole was physically cut in the back of the throne so she could whisper instructions to the two boys from behind.

  That arrangement quickly collapsed. Sophia, a daughter of Alexis from his first marriage, led a streltsy rebellion in April-May 1682. In the fighting that followed, Artamon Matveyev, one of Peter's greatest childhood benefactors, was killed; Peter watched some of these murders occur. The episode left the streltsy powerful enough to demand that Ivan be named senior tsar, with Peter as junior co-ruler. Sophia ruled as regent for seven years.

  Banished with his mother to the Preobrazhenskoye estate from 1682 to 1689, Peter turned the enforced exile into an education. At sixteen he found an English boat on the property, had it restored, and taught himself to sail. He sought out a foreign expert in the nearby German Quarter and befriended Andrew Vinius, a bibliophile who taught him Dutch, and two Dutch carpenters, Frans Timmerman and Karsten Brandt, who taught him shipbuilding. He studied arithmetic, geometry, and military sciences, and he drilled with what began as a toy army but would eventually evolve into the Preobrazhensky regiment, which fought in every major battle of the Great Northern War.

• 3. The Grand Embassy

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  In March 1697, Peter left Russia under a false name as part of an eighteen-month journey through Western Europe, the first tsar to leave the country in over a century. His disguise was largely futile: at nearly seven feet tall, he fooled no one. The diplomatic goal was to build a coalition against the Ottoman Empire, and it failed almost completely. France was allied to the Ottoman Sultan; Austria was absorbed in its own western wars; the continent was consumed by the question of who would succeed the childless King Charles II of Spain.

  Peter arrived in Zaandam on the 18th of August 1697 and spent a week studying saw-mills and shipbuilding before he was recognized and had to flee to Amsterdam. There, through the mediation of Nicolaas Witsen, he spent four months working in a Dutch East India Company shipyard under the supervision of Gerrit Claesz Pool, helping to build an East Indiaman named Peter and Paul. He found the Dutch carpenters worked too much by eye, lacking precise construction drawings. He collected skilled workers: Cornelis Cruys, a vice-admiral, later became the tsar's maritime advisor. Engineer Menno van Coehoorn refused to come.

  His curiosity ranged beyond ships. He visited the microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in Delft in October 1697, received what is described as an "eal viewer," and toured Frederik Ruysch's anatomical collection across five rooms. Ruysch taught him to catch and preserve butterflies. Peter met stadtholder William III in a tavern, visited Jan van der Heyden, the inventor of the fire hose, and collected paintings by Adam Silo. The Dutch regents eventually found the tsar too inquisitive and grew reluctant to help Russia further.

  On the 11th of January 1698, Peter arrived in England with an entourage that included four dwarfs, a monkey, six trumpeters, seventy soldiers, and Jacob Bruce. He stayed at 21 Norfolk Street, Strand. He visited the Royal Mint four times; Isaac Newton was the mint's warden at the time, though whether the two ever actually met is unclear. Peter was impressed by the Great Recoinage of 1696. He spent three months at Sayes Court as a guest of John Evelyn, a member of the Royal Society, and was trained on a telescope at the Greenwich Observatory by John Flamsteed. King William III gave him a schooner in exchange for English merchants receiving a monopoly on the tobacco trade in Russia. When Peter returned from the Grand Embassy that summer, he found the streltsy had rebelled again.

• 4. Remaking Russia

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  The second streltsy uprising of 1698 was crushed by General Gordon before Peter even returned home. Peter's response was deliberate and public: approximately 1,182 rebels were tortured and executed, and their bodies were displayed as a warning. The Streltsy were disbanded. His half-sister Sophia, whom the rebels had sought to restore, was kept in strict seclusion at Novodevichy Convent.

  Peter returned from the West with a long list of changes. He ordered his courtiers to adopt European clothing, banning caftans. He required officials to shave their long beards; those who refused paid an annual beard tax of one hundred rubles. He sought to end arranged marriages among the Russian nobility, which he considered barbaric.

  His administrative overhaul ran deeper. In 1699 he moved the new year's celebration from the 1st of September to the 1st of January and shifted Russia's calendar to the Julian system, declaring the year 7207 by the old reckoning to be 1700. When the Patriarch of Moscow's office fell vacant in 1700, Peter refused to name a replacement, eventually abolishing the patriarchate entirely in 1721 and replacing it with a Holy Synod controlled by a government Procurator. He converted monasteries with fewer than thirty monks into schools or churches. He forbade Russian men from joining monasteries before the age of fifty.

  In 1701 the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation opened under Jacob Bruce. In 1703 Peter introduced the first Russian newspaper, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti. He replaced Cyrillic numerals with Arabic numerals between 1705 and 1710, and reformed Russian orthography with a new civil script. Some 3,500 new words entered Russian during his reign, roughly one-fourth of them shipping and naval terms. In 1711 he created the Governing Senate of ten members, explicitly bypassing the Boyar Duma he mistrusted. The 1719 Berg Privilege enshrined the rights of miners in law and established the Collegium of Mining. A decree in 1721 allowed factory owners of any rank to purchase serfs for their plants. In 1722 the Table of Ranks replaced birth with merit as the basis for precedence among landowners, a system that remained in effect until the monarchy fell in 1917.

• 5. Wars on Two Fronts

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  Russia's only maritime outlet before Peter's wars was the White Sea at Arkhangelsk. The Baltic was controlled by Sweden, the Black Sea by the Ottoman Empire, and the Caspian by the Safavid Empire. Peter's first attempt to break this encirclement targeted the Ottoman fortress of Azov, near the Don River. The summer campaign of 1695 ended in failure. He returned to Moscow in November of that year and built a large navy at Voronezh over the winter, launching about thirty ships against the Ottomans and capturing Azov in July 1696.

  His attempt to wage war on Sweden began disastrously. At the Battle of Narva in 1700, Charles XII attacked through a blinding snowstorm rather than conducting a methodical siege, and the Russian army was routed. Peter responded by ordering church bells melted into cannons and mortars. While Charles turned his attention to Poland-Lithuania, Peter reorganized the army and began pushing into the Baltic, capturing the Swedish fortress that he renamed Shlisselburg and founding Saint Petersburg on the 29th of June 1703 on Hare Island. He built the city so urgently that he forbade stone construction anywhere else in Russia so that all stonemasons would work there.

  Charles XII eventually invaded Russia in 1708. After crossing the border, he defeated Peter at Golovchin in July, then turned south into Ukraine. Peter employed scorched earth, stripping the countryside of anything useful to the Swedes. Deprived of supplies and reinforcements, Charles's army stalled through the winter of 1708-1709. The decisive engagement came at Poltava on the 27th of June 1709, a complete defeat for Sweden that ended Charles's campaign and forced him to take refuge with the Ottoman Empire. The battle reversed Europe's assumption that Russia was militarily incompetent.

  Peter then overextended himself against the Ottomans and suffered a catastrophic campaign, forced by the Treaty of Pruth to surrender the Black Sea ports he had seized in 1697. The Sultan in return expelled Charles XII from Ottoman territory. Peace in the north came only with Charles's death in battle in 1718. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 gave Russia Ingria, Estonia, Livonia, and a substantial portion of Karelia; in exchange, Russia paid two million Riksdaler and surrendered most of Finland.

• 6. Family, Faith, and the Succession Problem

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  Peter had fifteen children by two wives, and only three survived to adulthood. His mother chose his first wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina, when Peter was sixteen, following Romanov tradition of selecting daughters from minor noble houses to prevent dynastic conflict. On his return from Europe in 1698, Peter divorced her and forced her into a convent. She had given him three children; only Alexei Petrovich survived childhood.

  Menshikov introduced Peter to Marta Helena Skowronska, the daughter of a Polish-Lithuanian peasant, sometime between 1702 and 1704. She converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Catherine. They married secretly sometime between the 23rd of October and the 1st of December 1707, then officially at Saint Isaac's Cathedral on the 19th of February 1712. In 1724 Peter crowned Catherine as Empress, though he remained Russia's actual ruler.

  The fate of his son Alexei illustrated how Peter handled threats to his authority within his own family. In 1718 Alexei was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, suspected of plotting against the Emperor. He was tried, confessed under torture, and sentenced to death. The execution required Peter's signed authorization, and Peter hesitated. Alexei died in prison; his death most likely resulted from injuries suffered during his torture. His mother Eudoxia was punished separately: dragged from her home, tried on fabricated adultery charges, publicly flogged, and confined in monasteries.

  The succession crisis this created was acute enough that in 1722 Peter issued a decree abolishing the traditional rule that the throne passed to direct male descendants. He had no surviving son. The decree allowed the reigning monarch to name any successor, an innovation so radical that Peter felt compelled to explain it publicly.

• 7. Death and Contested Memory

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  In the winter of 1723, Peter began suffering from problems with his urinary tract and bladder. In the summer of 1724, surgeons released upwards of four pounds of blocked urine. He remained bedridden until late autumn, then, convinced he had recovered, began a lengthy inspection tour. A legend holds that in November he waded into near-waist-deep water along the Gulf of Finland to rescue drowning soldiers and that the cold water worsened his condition. Historians have noted the story comes from a single German chronicler and treat it with skepticism. In early January 1725 he was struck again with uremia. According to legend he scrawled an unfinished note reading "Leave all to..." before losing consciousness and asked for his daughter Anna. He died between four and five in the morning on the 8th of February 1725, aged fifty-two years and seven months, after a reign of forty-two years. An autopsy found his bladder infected with gangrene. He is interred in Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral.

  The arguments over what Peter accomplished began almost immediately and have never stopped. For the Old Believers he was the Antichrist, identified as such partly because of his calendar reforms and poll tax. Voltaire's 1759 biography cast him as a man of the Enlightenment. Alexander Pushkin's 1833 poem "The Bronze Horseman" gave him the image of a creator-god. Slavophiles in the mid-19th century deplored his westernization. Stalin admired how Peter had forced industrialization against resistance, writing in 1928 that the tsar had made "an original attempt to leap out of the framework of backwardness." Evgeny Anisimov saw the same record differently, calling Peter "the creator of the administrative command system and the true ancestor of Stalin." Historian Y. Vodarsky argued in 1993 that Peter's methods actually put a brake on Russia's progress and held it back for one and a half centuries. Encyclopaedia Britannica's summation holds that he did not completely bridge the gulf between Russia and the West but that Russia became, under his rule, a great power without whose agreement no important European problem could thenceforth be settled.