Peter the Great

• Born: 6 June 1672
• Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
• Died: 8 February 1725
• Best Known As: The czar who modernized 18th century Russia

Name at birth: Petr Alekseevich

Peter the Great was the Russian czar who transformed Russia from an isolated agricultural society into an Empire on a par with European powers. Peter was the son of Czar Alexis (Fedor III Alakseevich) and his second wife. After the death of Alexis, Peter and his half-brother Ivan were co-czars who served under the regency of Ivan's sister, Sophia. Ivan died and Peter outmaneuvered Sophia to rule alone as czar from 1689. Peter toured Europe (sometimes in disguise to avoid being recognized) and educated himself in western culture and science, then returned to Russia and introduced military, civil and social reforms to make Russia more like Europe (especially Germany). He spent much of his time fighting wars, first against the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, then (from 1700) against the Swedes in the Great Northern War. He succeeded in conquering land on the Baltic Sea, where he founded St. Petersburg. A gateway to Europe, St. Petersburg became the new capital of Russia. Peter was reportedly more than six and a half feet tall and was often in the battlefield, occasionally returning home to address domestic issues and put down revolts. In 1725 he dove in the water to help rescue some drowning sailors; he ended up with a bad cold and died a short time later.

St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914, then renamed Leningrad after the death of V. I. Lenin (1924). In 1991 it was changed back to St. Petersburg...Peter often criticized his son, Alexei, for being incompetent and lazy, but apparently thought he was energetic enough to mount a coup attempt: Peter had Alexei arrested and sentenced to death, but Alexei died before he could be executed.

Peter ‘the Great’, Tsar (1682) and Emperor (1721) of Russia (1672-1725) Statesman, military leader, and diplomat, founder of Russian power and influence in Europe, of the regular Russian army and fleet, and of a national arms industry. Born Peter Alekseyevich Romanov, the son of Tsar Aleksey Mikhaylovich by his second wife, Peter was in constant danger from his half-sister Sofia and in 1682 he and his mother retreated to the village of Preobrazhenskoy near Moscow. Young Peter was fascinated by militaria and was soon drilling his own poteshnye—‘play soldiers’—recruited from his friends and experimenting with an old sailing boat, the origin of the Russian navy. In 1687 the poteshnye were reinforced by drafting men from the old streltsy regiments of Moscow and formed into two new, western-style regiments of the Imperial Guard, the Preobrazhenskiy and Semenovskiy.

In 1695 and 1696 Peter and his evolving army made two expeditions to the Turkish-held stronghold of Azov, in the south, the second of which was successful, establishing Russian power on the Sea of Azov. From March 1697 to July 1698 Peter made his famous incognito trip to the west, visiting Sweden, Prussia, Holland, and England and building up a vast store of naval, military, and scientific knowledge for his later reforms. His trip was curtailed by news of the final streltsy revolt. Peter then completed the transformation to a modern regular army on the western model, which had begun under his father, Tsar Aleksey. His strategic focus also shifted west, towards Europe and access to it via the Baltic, with the Great Northern war. Peter's new army saw its first action against the Swedes at Narva in 1700, but clearly had much to learn. They surrounded the Swedish fortress with about 34, 000 troops but the Swedish relief force, emerging from the woods, only 11, 000 strong, tore into them, killing up to 8, 000 and capturing all their artillery. Although Narva was a disaster, Peter continued his strategy of dominating the Gulf of Finland and securing access to the sea. By 1703 the Russians had the eastern end of the Gulf, and on 16 May the foundation stone of the Petropavlovsk—Peter and Paul—fortress was laid on the estuary of the river Neva. The growing settlement around was called Sankt Peter Burk, in Dutch: St Petersburg.

At Poltava on 27 June 1709, the first battle where Peter took personal command, the new Russian army scored its first victory over a western army, and one of Russia's greatest military triumphs. The Swedes, led by Charles XII, by now outnumbered nearly two to one and short of ammunition, nevertheless attacked a strongly defended Russian camp, and lost about half their strength killed and wounded. Historically, the Russians had been considered cowardly, lazy, and better at siege warfare than in the open field. This battle announced a new style.

In the ensuing years, Russia grew stronger, and foreign observers, including the Hanoverians and the English, newly joined, expressed anxiety about the growth of Russian power. Towards the end of his reign, Peter again turned south, seizing Derbent in 1722 and Baku and Reshut in 1723, gains recognized by the Persians and the Turks. The creation of three new fleets reflected the strategic direction of Peter's campaigns: the Baltic, the Azov, and the Caspian. The Baltic was the biggest and, by the end of the Great Northern war, had 124 Russian-built craft and 55 taken from the Swedes, including twenty sail of the line. Because the waters of the Baltic and the Sea of Azov were often shallow, galleys proved especially useful and Peter had 416 by the end of the Northern war. Although Peter drew much from foreign advisers, especially Scotsmen like Patrick Gordon, James Bruce, and G. B. Ogilvy, and the Swiss Franz Lefort, he also thought profoundly and wrote at length about the art of war. The Code of 1716 and Rules of Combat (1708) were his own work and drew heavily on his own experience. By the end of his reign Russia, according to a French diplomat writing to Louis XIV in 1723, ‘whose very name was scarcely known, has now become the object of attention of the greater powers of Europe, who solicit its friendship’.

Bibliography

• Duffy, Christopher, Russia's Military Way to the West (London, 1981)

— Christopher Bellamy

Peter I (1672-1725), called Peter the Great, was czar of Russia from 1682 to 1725. His reign was marked by a program of extensive reform known as Westernization and by the establishment of Russia as a major European power.

Contemporaries abroad tended to admire Peter I for his reforms and to fear him because of his country's growing power, but his reforms were generally unpopular with his subjects, not only because they entailed higher taxes and harder work for almost everyone but also because they disturbed ancient religious and cultural traditions. After his death, Russians soon came to realize that Peter had been the country's greatest ruler and that his reign had indeed been a high point in their history. That evaluation is still generally accepted by historians.

Peter was born in Moscow on May 30, 1672, the only son of Czar Alexis and his second wife, Natalia Naryshkin. The 13 children of Alexis' previous marriage included 3 who became prominent during Peter's youth: able and ambitious Sophia, half-blind and half-witted Ivan, and amiable Feodor, who succeeded Alexis in 1676.

Peter's formal education, entrusted to private tutors, began when he was 7 but was interrupted 3 years later, when Czar Feodor died without having named an heir. Sophia and a small group of supporters favored the frail Ivan, her 15-year-old brother, to succeed Feodor. Another group favored the robust and intelligent Peter and at once proclaimed him czar, planning that his mother serve as regent. That arrangement was quickly upset, however, when Sophia received the help of the Moscow troops and compelled the installation of Ivan as "First Czar, " Peter as "Second Czar, " and herself as regent.

Formative Years

During the next 7 years little was required of Peter except that he take part in formal ceremonies. Fascinated by military activities, he spent much time at games involving arms practice and battle maneuvers, at first with young friends and later with two regiments of soldiers that he was permitted to recruit and train. His curiosity and abundant energy led him also to the study and practice of the skills involved in navigation and such crafts as carpentry, stonecutting, and printing. In the course of these pursuits, he came into contact with a number of foreign residents and gained from them knowledge of the world outside Russia.

Disturbed by the trend of his development, Peter's mother mistakenly decided that she could change it by arranging for his marriage; at her direction, he was married to Eudoxia Lopukhin in January 1689. Still, he showed no inclination to forgo his first interests or his unconventional activities.

Political opposition to Sophia's regency came to a head during Peter's 17th year, and, impressed by the assurance of strong support if he would assert himself, Peter declared her office vacant and sent her away to a convent. That done, he returned to his habitual pursuits and continued to neglect personal responsibilities, even after Eudoxia had borne him a son, Alexis, in 1690. By that time he was a striking figure, impressive as a potential ruler but with scant interest in the duties involved.

It was not until 1695, when he had his first taste of actual fighting, against the Turkish forces at Azov, that Peter began to give serious thought to the problems he faced as czar. The death of "First Czar" Ivan during the following year finally brought him close to the full import of his position.

First Steps

Having been impressed at Azov by his country's lack of adequate fighting ships, Peter began with characteristic zeal to plan for an efficient navy. He sent groups of young men to western European countries to study navigation and shipbuilding; then, in 1697, he himself followed - an unprecedented step for a Russian czar - to acquire firsthand information and to hire shipwrights for service in Russia. He visited Holland, England, Germany, and Austria. In those countries he was impressed not only by their technological superiority over Russia but also by what seemed to him a superior style of life. When he returned to Russia in 1698, he was ready to make many changes.

One of Peter's first acts was to order that men shave off their beards, and when he met stubborn resistance, he modified his order only to the extent of imposing a tax on those who chose to keep their beards. He also shattered tradition by requiring that the old Russian calendar (which reckoned time from the creation of the world) be abandoned in favor of the Julian calendar used in the West. At the same time, he was dealing with two other matters, a revolt among the Moscow troops and the annoying presence of his unwanted wife, Eudoxia; he speedily quelled the revolt with savage executions and terminated his marriage by forcing Eudoxia into a convent.

Great Northern War

The handling of some of his problems, Peter soon learned, required more than his usual imperious tactics. During his European tour, he had obtained assurances of Western cooperation in forcing Sweden to cede the territory that Russia needed as an outlet to the Baltic Sea. He began the undertaking by a declaration of war on Sweden in 1700.

Peter led his forces in their first major encounter with the Swedes at Narva in November 1700 and was severely defeated by inferior numbers. Resorting to the means he had used with the navy - remodeling by Western patterns - he began at once to whip into shape a better organized, equipped, and trained army. In 1703 he led it to a redeeming victory and took from Sweden the mouth of the Neva River. He designated the site for a city to be named St. Petersburg and to become the imperial capital. A year later he captured Narva.

Taking advantage of a few years of respite while the Swedes were engaged with other enemies, Peter worked purposefully to strengthen Russian arms and to keep under control the domestic discontent that was breaking into open revolt in many areas, particularly along the Don and the Volga rivers. He was obliged to return to the war in mid-1709, however, to meet a Swedish invasion led by Charles XII. The opposing forces met at Poltava, where the Russians won a decisive victory. The battle did not end the war, but it marked a turning point and vindicated Peter's belief in his methods. Moreover, it had a profound psychological effect on the western European states, who now saw Russia as a formidable power.

Twelve years of indecisive hostilities followed the Poltava victory. In 1711 Peter had to divert some of his troops to the south, where the Turks, encouraged by Sweden, had attacked Russia. After a year of unsuccessful fighting, he had to cede the port of Azov, Russia's only point of access to the Black Sea. Meanwhile, intermittent fighting kept the main war going, and it was not until 1718 that Sweden reluctantly agreed to a consideration of peace terms. By the resulting Treaty of Nystad, signed in September 1721, Sweden ceded Ingria, Estonia, Livonia, and a portion of Karelia, thus giving Russia a firm foothold on the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea. Since Peter had already established Russian influence in Courland, his country was now a major Baltic power, having been provided with "a window to Europe" by the new acquisitions. In recognition of what he had achieved, the Russian Senate, a body created by Peter, conferred upon him the titles of "the Great" and "Emperor."

Personal Problems

After he freed himself of Eudoxia, Peter became attracted to Catherine Skavrenska, a Lithuanian girl of humble origin, and married her secretly, delaying until 1712 the public recognition of her as his consort. When Catherine bore a son, the Czar had him christened Peter Petrovich and anticipated his succession to the throne. Alexis, the son by his first marriage, had become a lazy, weak-willed, and hostile young man who resisted being molded to his father's standards. In the belief that Alexis was actually plotting against the throne, Peter ordered that he be taken to prison; and there, after being questioned under torture, Alexis died. Yet the Czar's problem was not solved: in 1719 Peter Petrovich died, leaving him no son as successor. Alexis had left a son, Peter Alekseyevich; but the Czar chose to bypass him and to decree, in 1722, that thereafter each ruler of Russia was free to name his heir. It is probable that Peter intended to name his wife, Catherine, as his heir, but he continued to postpone the formality.

Domestic Reforms

Although Peter carried out many reforms in his early years as czar, his major work as a reformer was done in the last decade of his reign. His goal was to create a powerful and prosperous state, efficiently and honestly administered, to which every subject could contribute. To achieve that goal, he refashioned many existing institutions and initiated new policies, generally guided by what he had learned of western Europe. He reorganized the country's entire administrative structure and promulgated the Table of Ranks, classifying civil service, military, and naval positions and providing for advancement on the basis of merit from lower to higher positions. He encouraged industry and commerce, spurred the development of science, and laid the foundations of the Academy of Sciences, which was established soon after his death. He instituted Russia's secular schools, eliminated the obsolete characters from the Russian alphabet, and established the country's first newspaper.

Even the Church felt the force of Peter's great energy. Although a religious man, he had no respect for the privileges accorded to the Church, was critical of many of its policies, and resented its resistance to his reforms. When Patriarch Adrian, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, died in 1700, Peter did not permit the vacancy to be filled. Finally, in 1721, he abolished the post of patriarch, substituting for it the Holy Synod, a board of prelates who were to direct the affairs of the Church under the supervision of a layman appointed by the czar.

Apparently, Peter found his greatest satisfaction in the development of St. Petersburg. He intended that this modern city become the center of the new Russia as Moscow had been the center of the old. He declared it to be the country's new capital and gradually transferred to it the central administrative offices. Built in Western style rather than the traditional Russian, it provided a visible symbol of his reforms.

Last Years

After the war with Sweden, Peter began to think seriously of his country's interests in Asia. At his direction, Russian forces conquered Kamchatka on the Pacific, and a Russian expedition explored the area now known as the Bering Strait. With prospects of more immediate value, he successfully pursued a war against Persia to strengthen Russia's position on the Caspian.

The treaty ending the war with Persia had yet to be ratified in 1724, when Peter's health began to fail rapidly. Characteristically, he continued to drive himself to the very limit of his strength, still postponing the designation of an heir. He died on Jan. 28, 1725, in the city that he had founded.

Further Reading

A study of Peter I is L. Jay Oliva, Russia in the Era of Peter the Great (1969). Ian Grey, Peter the Great (1960), is a comprehensive biography based on recent scholarship. A superb account of Peter's reign is Vasilii O. Klyuchevsky, Peter the Great, translated by Liliana Archibald (1958). Benedict Humphrey Sumner provides a brief, lucid survey of Peter's place in Russian history in Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (1950). Sumner also wrote the more specialized Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (1949).

Eugene Schuyler, Peter the Great (2 vols., 1884), is the most detailed biography available in English; it is somewhat dated but quite useful. Marc Raeff, ed., Peter the Great: Reformer or Revolutionary? (1963), is a collection of differing views about Peter by his contemporaries and later observers. Raeff's Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-century Nobility (1966) details the profound changes that Peter made in Russian society. The myth created around the image of Peter is discussed in Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (1961). Peter's life was fictionalized in Alexei Tolstoy, Peter the Great (trans. 1936).

(1672 - 1725), known as Peter the Great, tsar and emperor of Russia, 1682 - 1725.

The reign of Peter I is generally regarded as a watershed in Russian history, during which Russia expanded westward, became a leading player in European affairs, and underwent major reforms of its government, economy, religious affairs, and culture. Peter is regarded as a "modernizer" or "westernizer," who forced changes upon his often reluctant subjects. In 1846 the Russian historian Nikolai Pogodin wrote: "The Russia of today, that is to say, European Russia, diplomatic, political, military, commercial, industrial, scholastic, literary - is the creation of Peter the Great. Everywhere we look, we encounter this colossal figure, who casts a long shadow over our entire past." Writers before and after agreed that Peter made a mark on the course of Russian history, although there has always been disagreement about whether his influence was positive or negative.

Childhood and Youth

The only son of the second marriage of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich of Russia (r. 1645 - 1676) to Nathalie Kirillovna Naryshkina, Peter succeeded his half-brother Tsar Fyodor Alexeyevich (1676 - 1682) in May 1682. In June, following the bloody rebellion of the Moscow musketeers, in which members of his mother's family and government officials were massacred, he was crowned second tsar jointly with his elder, but severely handicapped, half-brother Ivan V. Kept out of government during the regency of his half-sister Sophia Alexeyevna (r. 1682 - 1689), Peter pursued personal interests that later fed into his public activities; these included meeting foreigners, learning to sail, and forming "play" troops under the command of foreign officers, which became the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky guards. On Tsar Ivan's death in 1696, Peter found himself sole ruler and enjoyed his first military victory, the capture of the Turkish fortress at Azov, a success which was facilitated by a newly created fleet on the Don river. From 1697 to 1698 he made an unprecedented tour of Western Europe with the Grand Embassy, the official aim of which was to revive the Holy League against the Ottomans, which Russia had entered in 1686. Peter traveled incognito, devoting much of his time to visiting major sites and institutions in his search for knowledge. He was particularly impressed with the Dutch Republic and England, where he studied shipbuilding. On his return, he forced his boyars to shave off their beards and adopt Western dress. In 1700 he discarded the old Byzantine creation calendar in favor of dating years in the Western manner from the birth of Christ. These symbolic acts set the agenda for cultural change.

The Great Northern War, 1700 - 1721

After making peace with the Ottoman Empire in 1700, Peter declared war on Sweden with the aim of regaining a foothold on the Baltic, in alliance with Denmark and King Augustus II of Poland. After some early defeats, notably at Narva in 1700, and the loss of its allies, Russia eventually gained the upper hand over the Swedes. After Narva, King Charles XII abandoned his Russian campaign to pursue Augustus into Poland and Saxony, allowing Russia to advance in Ingria and Livonia. When he eventually invaded Russia via Ukraine in 1707 - 1708, Charles found his troops overextended, underprovisioned, and confronted by a much improved Russian army. Victory at Poltava in Ukraine in 1709 allowed Peter to stage a successful assault on Sweden's eastern Baltic ports, including Viborg, Riga, and Reval (Tallinn) in 1710. Defeat by the Turks on the river Pruth in 1711 forced him to return Azov (ratified in the 1713 Treaty of Adrianople), but did not prevent him pursuing the Swedish war both at the negotiating table and on campaign, for instance, in Finland in 1713 - 1714 and against Sweden's remaining possessions in northern Germany and the Swedish mainland. The Treaty of Nystadt (1721) ratified Russian possession of Livonia, Estonia, and Ingria. During the celebrations the Senate awarded Peter the titles Emperor, the Great, and Father of the Fatherland. In 1722 - 1723 Peter conducted a campaign against Persia on the Caspian, capturing the ports of Baku and Derbent. Russia's military successes were achieved chiefly by intensive recruitment, which allowed Peter to keep armies in the field over several decades; training by foreign officers; home production of weapons, especially artillery; and well-organized provisioning. The task was made easier by the availability of a servile peasant population and the obstacles which the Russian terrain and climate posed for the invading Swedes. The navy, staffed mainly by foreign officers on both home-built and purchased ships, provided an auxiliary force in the latter stages of the Northern War, although Peter's personal involvement in naval affairs has led some historians to exaggerate the fleet's importance. The galley fleet was particularly effective, as exemplified at Hango in 1714.

Domestic Reforms

Many historians have argued that the demands of war were the driving force behind all Peter's reforms. He created the Senate in 1711, for example, to rule in his absence during the Turkish campaign. Among the ten new Swedish-inspired government departments, created between 1717 and 1720 and known as Colleges or collegiate boards, the Colleges of War, Admiralty, and Foreign Affairs consumed the bulk of state revenues, while the Colleges of Mines and Manufacturing concentrated on production for the war effort, operating iron works and manufacture of weapons, rope, canvas, uniforms, powder, and other products. The state remained the chief producer and customer, but Peter attempted to encourage individual enterprise by offering subsidies and exemptions. Free manpower was short, however, and in 1721 industrialists were allowed to purchase serfs for their factories. New provincial institutions, based on Swedish models and created in several restructuring programs, notably in 1708 - 1709 and 1718 - 1719, were intended to rationalize recruitment and tax collection, but were among the least successful of Peter's projects. As he said, money was the "artery of war." A number of piecemeal fiscal measures culminated in 1724 with the introduction of the poll tax (initially 74 kopecks per annum), which replaced direct taxation based on households with assessment of individual males. Peter also encouraged foreign trade and diversified indirect taxes, which were attached to such items and services as official paper for contracts, private bathhouses, oak coffins, and beards (the 1705 beard tax). Duties from liquor, customs, and salt were profitable.

The Table of Ranks (1722) consolidated earlier legislation by dividing the service elite - army and navy officers, government and court officials - into three columns of fourteen ranks, each containing a variable number of posts. No post was supposed to be allocated to any candidate who was unqualified for the duties involved, but birth and marriage continued to confer privilege at court. The Table was intended to encourage the existing nobility to perform more efficiently, while endorsing the concept of nobles as natural leaders of society: Any commoner who attained the lowest military rank - grade 14 - or civil grade 8 was granted noble status, including the right to pass it to his children.

Peter's educational reforms, too, were utilitarian in focus, as was his publishing program, which focused on such topics as shipbuilding, navigation, architecture, warfare, geography, and history. He introduced a new simplified alphabet, the so-called civil script, for printing secular works. The best-known and most successful of Peter's technical schools was the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (1701; from 1715, the St. Petersburg Naval Academy), which was run by British teachers. Its graduates were sent to teach in the socalled cipher or arithmetic schools (1714), but these failed to attract pupils. Priests and church schools continued to be the main suppliers of primary education, and religious books continued to sell better than secular ones. The Academy of Sciences is generally regarded as the major achievement, although it did not open until 1726 and was initially staffed entirely by foreigners. In Russia, as elsewhere, children in rural communities, where child labor was vital to the economy, remained uneducated.

The Church

The desire to deploy scarce resources as rationally as possible guided Peter's treatment of the Orthodox Church. He abolished the patriarchate, which was left vacant when the last Patriarch died in 1700, and in 1721 replaced it with the Holy Synod, which was based on the collegiate principle and later overseen by a secular official, the Over-Procurator. The Synod's rationale and program were set out in the Spiritual Regulation (1721). Peter siphoned off church funds as required, but he stopped short of secularizing church lands. He slimmed down the priesthood by redeploying superfluous clergymen into state service and restricting entry into monasteries, which he regarded as refuges for shirkers. Remaining churchmen accumulated various civic duties, such as keeping registers of births and deaths, running schools and hospitals, and publicizing government decrees. These measures continued seventeenth-century trends in reducing the church's independent power, but Peter went farther by reducing its role in cultural life. Himself a dutiful Orthodox Christian who attended church regularly, he was happy for the Church to take responsibility for the saving of men's souls, but not for it to rule their lives. His reforms were supported by educated churchmen imported from Ukraine.

St. Petersburg and the New Culture

The city of St. Petersburg began as an island fort at the mouth of the Neva river on land captured from the Swedes in 1703. From about 1712 it came to be regarded as the capital. In Russia's battle for international recognition, St. Petersburg was much more than a useful naval base and port. It was a clean sheet on which Peter could construct a microcosm of his New Russia. The Western designs and decoration of palaces, government buildings, and churches, built in stone by hired foreign architects according to a rational plan, and the European fashions that all Russian townspeople were forced to wear, were calculated to make foreigners feel that they were in Europe rather than in Asia. The city became a "great window recently opened in the north through which Russia looks on Europe" (Francesco Algarotti, 1739). Peter often referred to it as his "paradise," playing on the associations with St. Peter as well as expressing his personal delight in a city built on water. The central public spaces enjoyed amenities such as street lighting and paving and public welfare was supervised by the Chief of Police, although conditions were less salubrious in the backstreets. Nobles resented being uprooted from Moscow to this glorified building site. Noblewomen were not exempt. They were wrenched from their previously sheltered lives in the semi-secluded women's quarters or terem and ordered to abandon their modest, loose robes and veils in favor of Western low cut gowns and corsets and to socialize and drink with men. Some historians have referred to the "emancipation" of women under Peter, but it is doubtful whether this was the view of those involved.

Peter's Vision and Methods

Peter was an absolute ruler, whose great height (six foot seven inches) and explosive temper must have intimidated those close to him. His portraits, the first thoroughly Westernized Russian images painted or sculpted from life, were embellished with Imperial Roman, allegorical, military, and naval motifs to underline his power. Yet he sought to deflect his subjects' loyalty from himself to the state, exhorting them to work for the common good. A doer rather than a thinker, he lacked formal education and the patience for theorizing. Soviet historians favored the image of the Tsar-Carpenter, emphasizing the fourteen trades that Peter mastered, of which his favorites were shipbuilding and wood turning. He also occasionally practiced dentistry and surgery. Ironically, Peter often behaved in a manner that confirmed foreign prejudices that Russia was a barbaric country. Abroad he frequently offended his hosts with his appalling manners, while Western visitors to Russia were perplexed by his court, which featured dwarfs, giants, and human "monsters" (from his Cabinet of Curiosities), compulsory drinking sessions, which armed guards prevented guests prevented from leaving, and weird ceremonies staged by the "All-Mad, All-Jesting, All-Drunken Assembly," which, headed by the Prince-Pope, parodied religious rituals. Throughout his life Peter maintained a mock court headed by a mock tsar known as Prince Caesar, who conferred promotions on "Peter Mikhailov" or "Peter Alexeyev," as Peter liked to be known as he worked his way through the ranks of the army and navy.

One of the functions of Peter's mock institutions was to ridicule the old ways. Peter constantly lamented his subjects' reluctance to improve themselves on their own initiative. As he wrote in an edict of 1721 to replace sickles with more efficient scythes: "Even though something may be good, if it is new our people will not do it." He therefore resorted to force. In Russia, where serfdom was made law as recently as 1649, the idea of a servile population was not new, but under Peter servitude was extended and intensified. The army and navy swallowed up tens of thousands of men. State peasants were increasingly requisitioned to work on major projects. Previously free persons were transferred to the status of serfs during the introduction of the poll tax. Peter also believed in the power of rules, regulations, and statutes, devised "in order that everyone knows his duties and no one excuses himself on the grounds of ignorance." In 1720, for example, he issued the General Regulation, a "regulation of regulations" for the new government apparatus. Not only the peasants, but also the nobles, found life burdensome. They were forced to serve for life and to educate their sons for service.

Associates and Opponents

Despite his harsh methods, Peter was supported by a number of men, drawn from both the old Muscovite elite and from outside it. The most prominent of the newcomers were his favorite, the talented and corrupt Alexander Menshikov (1673 - 1729), whom he made a prince, and Paul Yaguzhinsky, who became the first Procurator-General. Top men from the traditional elite included General Boris Sheremetev, Chancellor Gavrila Golovkin, Admiral Fyodor Apraksin and Prince Fyodor Romodanovsky. The chief publicist was the Ukrainian churchman Feofan Prokopovich. It is a misconception that Peter relied on foreigners and commoners.

Religious traditionalists abhorred Peter, identifying him as the Antichrist. The several revolts of his reign all included some elements of antagonism toward foreigners and foreign innovations such as shaving and Western dress, along with more standard and substantive complaints about the encroachment of central authority, high taxes, poor conditions of service, and remuneration. The most serious were the musketeer revolt of 1698, the Astrakhan revolt of 1705, and the rebellion led by the Don Cossack Ivan Bulavin in 1707 - 1708. The disruption that worried Peter most, however, affected his inner circle. Peter was married twice: in 1689 to the noblewoman Yevdokia Lopukhina, whom he banished to a convent in 1699, and in 1712 to Catherine, a former servant girl from Livonia whom he met around 1703. He groomed the surviving son of his first marriage, Alexei Petrovich (1690 - 1718), as his successor, but they had a troubled relationship. In 1716 Alexei fled abroad. Lured back to Russia in 1718, he was tried and condemned to death for treason, based on unfounded charges of a plot to assassinate his father. Many of Alexei's associates were executed, and people in leading circles were suspected of sympathy for him. Peter and Catherine had at least ten children (the precise number is unknown), but only two girls reached maturity: Anna and Elizabeth (who reigned as empress from 1741 to 1761). In 1722 Peter issued a new Law of Succession by which the reigning monarch nominated his own successor, but he failed to record his choice before his death (from a bladder infection) in February (January O.S.) 1725. Immediately after Peter's death, Menshikov and some leading courtiers with guards' support backed Peter's widow, who reigned as Catherine I (1725 - 1727).

Views of Peter and His Reforms

The official view in the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth was that Peter had "given birth" to Russia, transforming it from "nonexistence" into "being." Poets represented him as Godlike. The man and his methods were easily accommodated in later eighteenth-century discourses of Enlightened Absolutism. Even during Peter's lifetime, however, questions were raised about the heavy cost of his schemes and the dangers of abandoning native culture and institutions. As the Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin commented in 1810: "Truly, St. Petersburg is founded on tears and corpses." He believed that Peter had made Russians citizens of the world, but prevented them from being Russians. Hatred of St. Petersburg as a symbol of alien traditions was an important element in the attitude of nineteenth-century Slavophiles, who believed that only the peasants had retained Russian cultural values. To their Westernizer opponents, however, Peter's reforms, stopping short of Western freedoms, had not gone far enough. In the later nineteenth century, serious studies of seventeenth-century Muscovy questioned the revolutionary nature of Peter's reign, underlining that many of Peter's reforms and policies, such as hiring foreigners, reforming the army, and borrowing Western culture, originated with his predecessors. The last tsars, especially Nicholas II, took a nostalgic view of pre-Petrine Russia, but Petrine values were revered by the imperial court until its demise.

Soviet historians generally took a bipolar view of Peter's reign. On the one hand, they believed that Russia had to catch up with the West, whatever the cost; hence they regarded institutional and cultural reforms, the new army, navy, factories, and so on as "progressive." Territorial expansion was approved. On the other hand, Soviet historians were bound to denounce Peter's exploitation of the peasantry and to praise popular rebels such as Bulavin; moreover, under Stalin, Peter's cosmopolitanism was treated with suspicion. Cultural historians in particular stressed native achievements over foreign borrowings. In the 1980s - 1990s some began to take a more negative view still, characterizing Peter as "the creator of the administrative-command system and the true ancestor of Stalin" (Anisimov, 1993). After the collapse of the USSR, the secession of parts of the former Empire and Union, and the decline of the armed forces and navy, many people looked back to Peter's reign as a time when Russia was strong and to Peter as an ideal example of a strong leader. The debate continues.

Bibliography

Anderson, M. S. (1995). Peter the Great. London: Longman.

Anisimov, E. V. (1993). Progress through Coercion: The Reforms of Peter the Great. New York: M. E. Sharpe.

Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671 - 1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Canadian American Slavic Studies. 8 (1974). Issue devoted to Peter's reign.

Cracraft, James. (1971). The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cracraft, James. (1990). The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cracraft, James. (1997). The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hughes, Lindsey, ed. (2000). Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.

Hughes, Lindsey. (2002). Peter the Great: A Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kliuchevsky, Vasily. (1958). Peter the Great, tr. L. Archibald. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Pososhkov, Ivan. (1987). The Book of Poverty and Wealth, ed., tr. A. P. Vlasto, L. R. Lewitter. London: The Athlone Press.

Raeff, Marc. ed. (1972). Peter the Great Changes Russia. Lexington, MA: Heath.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1984). The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—LINDSEY HUGHES

Peter I (Russia) (1672–1725; ruled 1682–1725), tsar of Russia. Peter I, who was formally known as Peter the Great after defeating Sweden in the Great Northern War in 1721, has long defined the transition from old to modern Russia in Russian historical consciousness. Although recent scholarship has modified this view somewhat, pointing out the antecedents of his reforms and the unchanged reality of Russia as a state built on the pillars of agriculture, elite service, and servile labor, few would challenge the defining character of the Petrine era for Russia's subsequent sense of its own modernity.

Foreign Affairs

By the time of Peter's accession in 1682, Muscovy had become a vast and sprawling realm, subsuming most of the east Slavic world, as well as the vast and barely explored Siberian expanse. It lacked access to the Baltic Sea to the north and the Black Sea to the south and suffered on the southern steppe border from debilitating raids by nomadic and pastoral peoples. In pursuit of a Baltic presence, Peter clashed with the equally ambitious Charles XII of Sweden and became enmeshed in the Great Northern War, a conflagration lasting over two decades, ending victoriously for Russia only in 1721 with the Treaty of Nystadt. Simultaneously, Peter faced a southern war against the Ottoman Empire, allied with Sweden for most of the Northern War.

Unsuccessful battles at Azov against the Ottomans in 1695–1696 set Peter's drastic reform of state and military structures in motion, convincing him of the urgency of building a navy. After opening a shipyard on the lower Volga River, in Voronezh, he departed on his vaunted Great Embassy, an extended journey through Europe, traveling nominally incognito as a captain ("Peter Mikhailov") largely to avoid ceremonial obligations at foreign courts. He spent most of 1697–1698 abroad, in Holland, England, the Germanies, and France, observing trades and hiring hundreds of craftsmen and naval officers to work in Russia building and training a fleet. Upon his return he inaugurated a flurry of changes, mostly designed to build a formidable navy and maximize the number of men in arms. These included establishing a Navigational (later Naval) Academy and initiating a military draft to replace the outmoded mobilization of peasant militias. Beginning in 1705 one adult male in seventy was to be drafted, and, during the course of the Northern War, the ratio fell as low as one in twenty. Those drafted served for life, and their legal status became that of soldier. While the number of those in arms was not dramatically greater than before, perhaps a quarter million at its peak, these soldiers, organized into permanent regiments and detachments, were far better trained and equipped than their forebears.

The dual war against Sweden and the Ottoman Empire (and, at the end of the reign, against Persia) constituted an immense drain on resources and cost tens of thousands of lives. After succumbing to Sweden's superior forces at Narva, in contemporary Estonia, in 1700, Peter's forces slowly gained an upper hand, most spectacularly in the south at Poltava in 1709. A significant setback in 1711 at Pruth, north of the Caspian Sea, nearly cost Peter his life and much of his army, but they recovered, and by 1714 the tide of war had turned decisively in Russia's favor. The final victory and Treaty of 1721 secured Russia's place in Europe's northern waters, and it began Russia's extended push to the south, a process not completed until the 1780s.

Personal and Court Life

Biographies of Peter emphasize his untraditional upbringing in the suburban Muscovite village of Preobrazhensky. Removed from the confines of the Moscow Kremlin, he spent much of his boyhood playing at war, in the company of commoners and foreigners rather than with churchmen and the scions of aristocratic families, as had been the norm. Peter's height (over six-and-a-half feet tall) and energy, his unquenchable curiosity, in particular for practical technologies, and his bawdiness and impatience with the formalities of tradition also are invariably seen as embodying his differences from those who preceded him to the throne. This tendency toward earthiness manifested itself in drunken and debauched revelry with his confreres at court, Peter's so-called fledglings, but the Petrine "culture of laughter" had a political and ritualized side beyond the mere exercise of merriment. Peter created mock institutions, such as His Majesty's Most-Drunken Synod, as an antidote to the solemnities of the church hierarchy—to which he nevertheless regularly had to submit—as if to emphasize the tsar's independence of them and his devotion to this-worldly endeavors. He created the mock title of "Prince Pope," a playful alter ego sometimes termed the Russian John Barleycorn.

Cultural and Religious Reform

Peter's cultural revolution often took on a decidedly coercive cast. Symbolic of his statist and modernizing vision was the establishment of a new capital, St. Petersburg, situated in the swampy territory of Ingermanland, on the site of a small fortress on the southeastern rim of the Gulf of Finland. First proclaimed in 1704, the capital's initial permanent structures were completed in 1707, when the government began to shift from Moscow. Situated far from the center of Russian population, with a German name, a decidedly un-Russian rectilinear street pattern, and distinctly European architecture, the new capital stood as a powerful statement of the massive Europeanization to which Peter meant to subject his realm.

Taxes on beards and sleeves, first imposed in 1699–1700, obliged serving men to break with Muscovite appearances and adopt European dress. The balls at court, culminating in the 1718 decree on "assemblies," imposed a new Europeanized public sociability at court, one that commanded the visible presence of women as well as men at balls, formal dinners, and celebrations. The switch in 1700 to the Julian calendar (previously the new year had occurred on September 1), and counting the years from the birth of Christ rather than from creation, commanded nothing less than a renovatio of time. The imposition of a new "civil" alphabet in 1707, which over time became the orthography of officialdom and secularity, reinforced in highly visible ways the symbolic separation of the church's spiritual realm (Church Slavonic and the religious calendar) from the state's civic realm.

Peter's determination to separate the church from and subordinate it to the state defined his entire approach to ecclesiastical authority, culminating in the elimination of the patriarchate in 1721 and its replacement by a governmental body, the Holy Synod. Peter's relationships to church and religion were more complex than mere caesaropapism, however. Sincerely if eccentrically religious, he held redemption and salvation paramount, and he relied on clergy to help him rule and reign. Leading ecclesiastic officials, such as Feofan Prokopovich and Gavriil Buzhinskii (the first rector of the Alexander Nevski monastery), articulated the ideological legitimation for Peter's reforms and produced the defining panegyrics of his reign and legacy. Parish clergy were required (at least by the terms of the Spiritual Regulation of 1721) to act as agencies of the law as well as of the soul, by reading aloud new decrees and keeping parish registries and confession lists. The large monastic clergy, whom Peter viewed as little more than parasites, experienced reform personally as Peter closed approximately two-thirds of Russia's monasteries and submitted the rest to a test of their social utility.

Social and Administrative Policies

It would be a mistake to imagine that Peter's reforms followed an orderly or systematic path. Nevertheless, a functionalist schema suggested by the early-twentieth-century historian Paul Miliukov effectively captures the dynamics of policy reform. Military necessity drove technological and military reform, whose immense costs (commanding up to 90 percent of the budget) necessitated changes in taxation and in mass mobilization. Thus, Peter imposed numerous tariffs and luxury taxes before transforming direct taxation in 1724 from a household basis to a per capita "soul tax" of 74 kopecks, which counted adult males (with certain exemptions). He eliminated slavery, making all former slaves into serfs, who were thus subject to the soul tax and military recruitment. Changes such as these demanded comparable reforms in central and provincial administration, the conducting of regular censuses, and the overhaul of state service.

Peter's interventions in the landed nobility were particularly momentous. Having done away with the last of the landed militias, and freed from the old system of precedence (Mestnichestvo), Peter pursued ad hoc strategies to make service more professional. As before, service remained compulsory, but it was deemed a full-time, lifelong obligation, slowly transforming noble serving men into absentee landlords. Seeking to loosen the stranglehold of elite noble clans, Peter collapsed all forms of land tenure into hereditary land, and he elevated several foreigners and lowborn Russians to positions of authority, nominally on the basis of ability. This latter practice was institutionalized in 1722 with the Table of Ranks and Orders, which pegged specific work to specific ranks, salaries, and privileges. In addition to eliminating virtually all of the Muscovite terms of status, such as "boyar" and "boyar's son," the Table of Ranks created a mechanism of advancement, at least on paper, whereby untitled servitors could advance first to personal nobility and then to hereditary nobility. Peter also intervened directly in familial inheritance by abolishing partible inheritance in 1714 in favor of unigeniture, wherein one son would inherit the entire estate. Deeply resented by noble families, unigeniture was dropped in 1731 and partible inheritance returned.

To maintain administration during his frequent absences, he created the Ruling Senate in 1711, which had the power of decree in the tsar's name. Originally composed of his closest advisers, the Senate took on a more bureaucratic cast toward the end of his reign, when Peter replaced the Muscovite system of ad hoc civil chancelleries with twelve functionally defined colleges, each of which was to be run by a council rather than by a single individual as in a ministerial system. Each college was represented in the revised Senate. Provincial government underwent a somewhat more modest reorganization in 1708 with the creation of eight vast territorial governments. These territorial governments had almost no direct contact with the populations over which they nominally ruled. As before, the exercise of governmental authority in the provinces relied mostly on a mixture of military presence and unpaid office holding. Exceptions to this rule were tax collecting and military recruitment, placed in the hands of a cadre of armed horsemen called fiscals, a group whose name became synonymous with violence and brute confiscation.

The disruptions generated by these widely unpopular policies engendered extensive popular resentment and periodic waves of armed resistance and defections from his ranks. These included rebellions by Moscow's musketeers (strel'tsy) in 1697, Cossack-led rebellions (Bulavin's revolt in 1707 and Mazepa's defection to the Swedes in 1708), and Old Believer riots (1703–1704 and later). Numerous elements of Russia's population looked upon the era as one of oppression and betrayal and upon the tsar as a tyrant, usurper, and Antichrist. All such opposition met fierce repression; none elicited moderation or concessions.

Succession

A combination of familial rivalry (the disinheritance of his eldest son, Alexis, and his death in prison before his planned execution in 1718) and misfortune (the death of his youngest son, Peter, in 1716) deprived Peter of direct male heirs. In response, Peter decreed a new form of succession in 1722 in which the reigning monarch named the successor. This shortsighted decision virtually guaranteed periodic instability at court, especially when a ruler died without naming a successor, as was the case with Peter himself. Unintentionally, however, it opened the way for nearly a century of female rule by displacing the principle of father-son lineage. Peter's widow, Catherine, thus became Russia's first crowned female ruler in 1725.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Pososhkhóv, Iván. The Book of Poverty and Wealth. Translated by L. R. Lewitter and A. P. Vlasto. Stanford, 1987.

The Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great. Edited and translated by Alexander V. Muller. Seattle, 1972.

Secondary Sources

Anisimov, Evgenii V. The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Coercion in Russia. Translated by John T. Alexander. Armonk, N.Y., 1993.

Bushkovitch, Paul. Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. London, 1971.

Hughes, Lindsey. Peter the Great: A Biography. New Haven, 2002.

——. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, 1998.

Peterson, Claes. Peter the Great's Administrative and Judicial Reforms: Swedish Antecedents and the Process of Reception. Translated by Michael F. Metcalf. Stockholm, 1979.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought. New York, 1985.

—GARY MARKER

A Russian czar of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who tried to transform Russia from a backward nation into a progressive one by introducing customs and ideas from western European countries. He moved the capital of Russia from Moscow to a new city he had built, St. Petersburg, which was renamed Leningrad after the Russian Revolution and has since had its old name restored due to the collapse of communism.

Quotes:

"I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself."

"Peter the Great" redirects here. For the king of Aragon, see Peter III of Aragon.

This article is about the Russian ruler. For the Kirov class battlecruiser, see Russian battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy.

Peter I the Great
Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias
Reign	7 May 1682–8 February 1725
Coronation	25 June 1682
Predecessor	Feodor III
Successor	Catherine I
Consort	Eudoxia Lopukhina Martha Skavronskaya
Issue
Alexei Petrovich, Tsarevich of Russia Grand Duke Alexander Anna, Duchess of Holstein-Gottorp Elizabeth of Russia Grand Duchess Natalia
House	House of Romanov
Father	Alexis of Russia
Mother	Nataliya Naryshkina
Born	9 June 1672(1672-06-09) Moscow
Died	8 February 1725 (aged 52)
Signature

Peter I the Great or Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov (Russian: Пётр Алексе́евич Рома́нов, Пётр I, Pyotr I, or Пётр Вели́кий, Pyotr Velikiy) (9 June [O.S. 30 May] 1672 – 8 February [O.S. 28 January] 1725)^[1] ruled Russia and later the Russian Empire from 7 May [O.S. 27 April] 1682 until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his weak and sickly half-brother, Ivan V.

Peter the Great carried out a policy of modernization and expansion that transformed the Tsardom of Russia into the 3-billion acre Russian Empire, a major European power.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Children 1.2 Early reign 1.3 Great Northern War 1.4 Later years 1.5 Death 2 Issue 3 In popular culture 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References

Biography

Peter was born in 1672 in Moscow, Russia to Alexis I of Russia and his second wife Nataliya Kyrillovna Naryshkina, within the walls of the Kremlin.

On 29 January, 1676, Tsar Alexis I died, leaving the sovereignty to Peter's elder half-brother, the weak and sickly Feodor III. Throughout this period, the government was largely run by Artamon Matveev, an enlightened friend of Alexis, the political head of the Naryshkin family and one of Peter's greatest childhood benefactors. This position changed when Feodor died six years later in 1682. As Feodor did not leave any children, a dispute arose between the Naryshkin and Miloslavsky families over who should inherit the throne. Peter's other half-brother, Ivan V, was the next for the throne, but he was chronically ill and of infirm mind. Consequently, the Boyar Duma (a council of Russian nobles) chose the ten-year old Peter to become Tsar, his mother becoming regent. This arrangement was brought before the people of Moscow, as ancient tradition demanded, where the people ratified it. But one of Alexis' daughters from his first marriage, Sophia Alekseyevna, led a rebellion of the Streltsy (Russia's elite military corps). In the subsequent conflict, some of Peter's relatives and friends were murdered, including Matveev, and Peter witnessed some of these acts of political violence.^[2]

Peter the Great at a young age

The Streltsy uprising of April-May 1682 made it possible for Sophia, the Miloslavskys (the clan of Ivan), and their allies, to insist that Peter and Ivan be proclaimed joint Tsars, with Ivan being acclaimed as the senior of the two. Sophia acted as regent during the minority of the two sovereigns and exercised all power. Peculiarly, a large hole was cut in the back of the dual-seated throne used by Ivan and Peter. Sophia would sit behind the throne and listen as Peter conversed with nobles, also feeding him information and giving him responses to questions and problems. This throne can be seen in the Kremlin museum in Moscow. For seven years, she ruled as an autocrat.

Peter was not particularly concerned that others ruled in his own name. He engaged in such pastimes as shipbuilding and sailing, as well as mock battles with his toy army. Peter's mother sought to force him to adopt a more conventional approach and arranged his marriage to Eudoxia Lopukhina in 1689.^[3] The marriage was a failure, and ten years later Peter forced her to become a nun and thus freed himself from the union.

By the summer of 1689, Peter planned to take power from his half-sister Sophia, whose position had been weakened by two unsuccessful Crimean campaigns. When she learned of his designs, Sophia began to conspire with the leaders of the Streltsy, who continually aroused disorder and dissent of the tsar's rule. Unfortunately for Sophia, Peter, warned by the Streltsy, escaped in the middle of the night to the impenetrable monastery of Troitsky; there he slowly gathered his adherents and others, who perceived he would win the power struggle. She was therefore overthrown, with Peter I and Ivan V continuing to act as co-tsars. Peter forced Sophia to enter a convent, where she gave up her name and position as a member of the royal family.

Still, Peter could not acquire actual control over Russian affairs. Power was instead exercised by his mother, Nataliya Naryshkina. It was only when Nataliya died in 1694 that Peter became an independent sovereign.^[4] Formally, Ivan V remained a co-ruler with Peter, although he was still ineffective. Peter became the sole ruler when Ivan died in 1696.

Peter the First Looking at the Baltic Sea.

Peter grew to be quite tall as an adult, especially for the time period. Standing at 6 ft 8 in(200 cm) in height, the Russian tsar was literally head and shoulders above his contemporaries both in Russia and throughout Europe.^[5] Peter, however, lacked the overall proportional heft and bulk generally found in a man that size. Both Peter's hands and feet were small, and his shoulders narrow for his height; likewise, his head was also small for his tall body. Added to this were Peter's noticeable facial tics, and, judging by descriptions handed down, he may have suffered from petit mal, a form of epilepsy.^[6]

Filippo Baltari, a young Italian visitor to Peter's court, wrote:

"Tsar Peter was tall and thin, rather than stout. His hair was thick, short, and dark brown; he had large eyes, black with long lashes, a well-shaped mouth, but the lower lip was slightly disfigured...For his great height, his feet seemed very narrow. His head was sometimes tugged to the right by convulsions."

Otherwise, judging by documents—or lack thereof—that have managed to survive to the present day, few contemporaries, either in or outside of Russia, commented on Peter's great height or appearance.

Children

Peter the Great had two wives with whom he had 11 children. His eldest child and heir, Alexei, was suspected of being involved in a plot to overthrow the Emperor. Peter, after some hesitation, finally put his own son to death and ruled that each tsar should choose his own successor.

Capture of Azov 1696

Early reign

Peter implemented sweeping reforms aimed at modernizing Russia. Heavily influenced by his advisors from Western Europe, Peter reorganized the Russian army along modern lines and dreamed of making Russia a maritime power. He faced much opposition to these policies at home, but brutally suppressed any and all rebellions against his authority, the rebelling of streltsy, Bashkirs, Astrakhan and including the greatest civil uprising of his reign, the Bulavin Rebellion. Further, Peter implemented social modernization in an absolute manner by requiring courtiers, state officials, and the military to shave their beards and adopt modern clothing styles.^[7]

To improve his nation's position on the seas, Peter sought to gain more maritime outlets. His only outlet at the time was the White Sea at Arkhangelsk. The Baltic Sea was at the time controlled by Sweden in the north, while the Black Sea was controlled by the Ottoman Empire in the south. Peter attempted to acquire control of the Black Sea, but to do so he would have to expel the Tatars from the surrounding areas. He was forced, as part of an agreement with Poland, which ceded Kiev to Russia, to wage war against the Crimean Khan and against the Khan's overlord, the Ottoman Sultan. Peter's primary objective became the capture of the Ottoman fortress of Azov, near the Don River. In the summer of 1695 Peter organized the Azov campaigns in order to take the fortress, but his attempts ended in failure. Peter returned to Moscow in November of that year, and promptly began building a large navy. He launched about thirty ships against the Ottomans in 1696, capturing Azov in July of that year. On 12 September 1698, Peter officially founded the first Russian Navy base, Taganrog.

The Peter the Great statue in Taganrog by Mark Antokolski

Peter knew that Russia could not face the Ottoman Empire alone. In 1697, he traveled incognito to Europe on an 18-month journey with a large Russian delegation–the so-called "Grand Embassy"—to seek the aid of the European monarchs.^[8] Peter's hopes were dashed; France was a traditional ally of the Ottoman Sultan, and Austria was eager to maintain peace in the east whilst conducting its own wars in the west. Peter, furthermore, had chosen the most inopportune moment; the Europeans at the time were more concerned about who would succeed the childless Spanish King Charles II than about fighting the Ottoman Sultan.

The "Grand Embassy", although failing to complete the mission of creating an anti-Ottoman alliance, still continued to travel across Europe. In visiting Holland, Peter learned much about the life in Western Europe. He studied shipbuilding in Zaandam and Amsterdam, and later put this learning to use in helping build Russia's navy during his rule.^[9] Thanks to the mediation of Nicolaas Witsen, mayor of Amsterdam and expert on Russia par excellence, the Tsar was given the opportunity to gain practical experience in the largest shipyard in the world, belonging to the Dutch East India Company, for a period of four months. The Tsar helped with the construction of an East Indiaman especially laid down for him: Peter and Paul. During his stay the tsar engaged many skilled workers such as builders of locks, fortresses, shipwrights and seamen. Cornelis Cruys, a vice-admiral who became under Franz Lefort the Tsar's advisor in maritime affairs. Besides Peter paid a visit to Frederik Ruysch, who taught him how to draw teeth and catch butterflies. Also Ludolf Bakhuysen, a painter of seascapes and Jan van der Heyden the inventor of the fire hose, received Peter, who was keen on learning and bringing home what he had seen. On 16 January 1698 Peter organized his farewell party and invited Johan Huydecoper van Maarsseveen, who had to sit between Lefort and the tsar and drink.

Portrait of Peter I by Godfrey Kneller, 1698. This portrait was a Peter's gift to King of England.

In England he met with King William III, visited Greenwich and Oxford, was painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller and saw a Royal Navy Fleet Review at Deptford. He also travelled to the fledgling city of Manchester to learn the techniques of city building he would later use to great effect at Saint Petersburg. Then the Embassy went to Leipzig, Dresden and Vienna. He spoke with August the Strong and Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor. The Embassy did not make it to Venice. The visit of Peter was cut short in 1698, when he was forced to rush home by a rebellion of the streltsy. The rebellion was, however, easily crushed before Peter returned home from England; of the Tsar's troops, only one was killed. Peter nevertheless acted ruthlessly towards the mutineers. Over 1200 of the rebels were tortured and executed, and Peter ordered that their bodies be publicly exhibited as a warning to future conspirators.^[10] The streltsy were disbanded, and the individual they sought to put on the Throne—Peter's half-sister Sophia—was forced to become a nun.

Also, upon his return from his European tour, Peter sought to end his unhappy marriage. He divorced the Tsaritsa, Eudoxia Lopukhina. The Tsaritsa had borne Peter three children, although only one—the Tsarevich Alexei—had survived past his childhood.

In 1698, Peter sent a delegation to Malta under boyar Boris Petrovich Sheremetyev, to observe the training and abilities of the Knights of Malta and their fleet. Sheremetyev also investigated the possibility of future joint ventures with the Knights, including action against the Turks and the possibility of a future Russian naval base.^[11]

Peter's visits to the West impressed upon him the notion that European customs were in several respects superior to Russian traditions. He commanded all of his courtiers and officials to cut off their long beards—causing his Boyars, who were very fond of their beards, great upset^[12]—and wear European clothing. Boyars who sought to retain their beards were required to pay an annual beard tax of one hundred rubles. He also sought to end arranged marriages, which were the norm among the Russian nobility, because he thought such a practice was not only barbaric but also led to domestic violence since the partners usually resented each other in this forced union.^[13]

In 1699, Peter also changed the celebration of new year from 1 September to 1 January. Traditionally, the years were reckoned from the purported creation of the World, but after Peter's reforms, they were to be counted from the birth of Christ. Thus, in the year 7207 of the old Russian calendar, Peter proclaimed that the Julian Calendar was in effect and the year was 1700.^[14]

Great Northern War

Main article: Great Northern War

Peter made a temporary peace with the Ottoman Empire that allowed him to keep the captured fort of Azov, and turned his attention to Russian maritime supremacy. He sought to acquire control of the Baltic Sea, which had been taken by Sweden a half-century earlier. Peter declared war on Sweden, which was at the time led by King Charles XII. Sweden was also opposed by Denmark-Norway, Saxony, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Peter I of Russia pacifies his marauding troops after taking Narva in 1704 by Nikolay Sauerweid, 1859

Russia turned out to be ill-prepared to fight the Swedes, and their first attempt at seizing the Baltic coast ended in disaster at the Battle of Narva in 1700. In the conflict, the forces of Charles XII used a blinding snowstorm to their advantage. After the battle, Charles XII decided to concentrate his forces against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, giving Peter I time to reorganize the Russian army.

As the Poles and Lithuanians on one side and Swedes on the other fought each other, Peter founded the city of Saint Petersburg (Germanically named after Saint Peter the Apostle) in Ingermanland (province of Swedish empire, which he had captured) in 1703. He forbade the building of stone edifices outside Saint Petersburg – which he intended to become Russia's capital – so that all the stonemasons could participate in the construction of the new city. He also took Martha Skavronskaya as a mistress. Martha converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and took the name Catherine, allegedly marrying Peter in secret in 1707. In any case Peter valued Catherine and proceeded to marry her again (this time officially) at Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg on 9 February 1712.

Following several defeats, the Polish King August II abdicated in 1706. Charles XII turned his attention to Russia, invading it in 1708. After crossing into Russia, Charles defeated Peter at Golovchin in July. In the Battle of Lesnaya, however, Charles suffered his first loss after Peter crushed a group of Swedish reinforcements marching from Riga. Deprived of this aid, Charles was forced to abandon his proposed march on Moscow.

Peter I in the Battle of Poltava (a mosaic by Mikhail Lomonosov)

Charles XII refused to retreat to Poland or back to Sweden, instead invading Ukraine. Peter withdrew his army southward, destroying any property that could assist the Swedes along the way. Deprived of local supplies, the Swedish army was forced to halt its advance in the winter of 1708–1709. In the summer of 1709, they nevertheless resumed their efforts to capture Ukraine, culminating in the Battle of Poltava on 27 June. The battle was a decisive defeat for Swedish forces, ending Charles' campaign in Ukraine and forcing him into exile in the Ottoman Empire. In Poland, August II was restored as King.

Peter, overestimating the support he would receive from Balkan allies, attacked the Ottoman Empire, initiating the Russo-Turkish War of 1710.^[15] Normally, the Boyar Duma would have exercised power during his absence. Peter, however, mistrusted the boyars; he instead abolished the Duma and created a Senate of ten members. Peter's campaign in the Ottoman Empire was disastrous, and in the ensuing peace treaty, Peter was forced to return the Black Sea ports he had seized in 1697.^[15] In return, the Sultan expelled Charles XII, but Russia was forced to guarantee safe passage to the Swedish king.^[15]

Peter's northern armies took the Swedish province of Livonia (the northern half of modern Latvia, and the southern half of modern Estonia), driving the Swedes back into Finland. In 1714 the Russian fleet won the Battle of Gangut. Most of Finland was occupied by the Russians. In 1716 and 1717, the Tsar revisited the Netherlands, and went to see Herman Boerhaave. He continued his travel to the Austrian Netherlands and France. The Tsar's navy was so powerful that the Russians could penetrate Sweden. Peter also obtained the assistance of the Electorate of Hanover and the Kingdom of Prussia. Still, Charles XII refused to yield, and not until his death in battle in 1718 did peace become feasible. After the battle near Åland Sweden made peace with all powers but Russia by 1720. In 1721, the Treaty of Nystad ended what became known as the Great Northern War. Russia acquired Ingria, Estonia, Livonia and a substantial portion of Karelia. In turn, Russia paid two million Riksdaler and surrendered most of Finland. The Tsar was, however, permitted to retain some Finnish lands close to Saint Petersburg, which he had made his capital in 1712. He gained access to a warm-water-port during his reign for easier trading with the west part of Europe.

Later years

Diamond order of Peter the Great

Peter I's last years were marked by further reform in Russia. On 22 October 1721, soon after peace was made with Sweden, he was acclaimed Emperor of All Russia. Some proposed that he take the title Emperor of the East, but he refused. Gavrila Golovkin, the State Chancellor, was the first to add "the Great, Father of His Country, Emperor of All the Russias" to Peter's traditional title Tsar following a speech by the archbishop of Pskov in 1721.

Peter's imperial title was recognized by Augustus II of Poland, Frederick William I of Prussia and Frederick I of Sweden, but not by the other European monarchs. In the minds of many, the word emperor connoted superiority or pre-eminence over "mere" kings. Several rulers feared that Peter would claim authority over them, just as the Holy Roman Emperor had once claimed suzerainty over all Christian nations.

During Peter's reign the Russian Orthodox Church was reformed. The traditional leader of the Church was the Patriarch of Moscow. In 1700, when the office fell vacant, Peter had refused to name a replacement, allowing the Patriarch's Coadjutor (or deputy) to discharge the duties of the office. Twenty-one years later, in 1721, Peter followed the advice of Feofan Prokopovich and erected the Holy Synod, a council of ten clergymen, to take the place of the Patriarch and Coadjutor. Peter also implemented a law which stipulated that no Russian man could join a monastery before the age of 50. He felt that too many able Russian men were being wasted away by clerical work when they could be joining his new and improved army.^[16] And in 18th century Russia, few people (men and women) lived to over a half century, therefore very few men became monks during Peter's reign, much to the dismay of the Russian Church.

In 1722, Peter created a new order of precedence, known as the Table of Ranks. Formerly, precedence had been determined by birth. In order to deprive the Boyars of their high positions, Peter directed that precedence should be determined by merit and service to the Emperor. The Table of Ranks continued to remain in effect until the Russian monarchy was overthrown in 1917. In addition, Peter decided that all of the children of the nobility should have some early education, especially in the areas of sciences. Therefore, on 28 February 1714, he introduced the decree on compulsory education which dictated that all Russian children of the nobility, of government clerks and even lesser ranked officials between the ages of 10 and 15 must learn basic mathematics and geometry and that they should be tested on it at the end of their studies.^[17]

Peter I interrogating his son Alexei, a painting by Nikolai Ge (1871)

Peter also introduced new taxes to fund improvements in Saint Petersburg. He abolished the land tax and household tax, and replaced them with a capitation. The taxes on land on households were payable only by individuals who owned property or maintained families; the new head taxes, however, were payable by serfs and paupers.

In 1724, Peter had his second wife, Catherine, crowned as Empress, although he remained Russia's actual ruler. All of Peter's male children had died—the eldest son, Alexei, had been tortured and killed on Peter's orders in 1718 because he had disobeyed his father and opposed official policies. At the same time, Alexei's mother Eudoxia had also been punished; she was dragged from her home and tried on false charges of adultery. A similar fate befell Peter's beautiful mistress, Anna Mons, in 1704.

In 1725, construction of Peterhof, a palace near Saint Petersburg, was completed. Peterhof (Dutch for "Peter's Court") was a grand residence, becoming known as the "Russian Versailles".

Death

Peter the Great on his deathbed

The most famous (1782) statue of Peter I in Saint Petersburg, informally known as the Bronze Horseman

In the winter of 1723, Peter, whose overall health was never robust, began having problems with his urinary tract and bladder. In the summer of 1724 a team of doctors performed the necessary surgery releasing upwards of four pounds of blocked urine. Peter remained bedridden till late autumn. Then in the first week of October, restless and certain he was cured, Peter began a lengthy inspection tour of various projects. According to legend, it was in November, while at Lakhta along the Finnish Gulf to inspect some ironworks, that Peter saw a group of soldiers drowning not far from shore and, wading out into near-waist deep water, came to their rescue.^[18]

This icy water rescue is said to have exacerbated Peter's bladder problems and caused his death. The story, however, has been viewed with skepticism by some historians, pointing out that the German chronicler Jacob von Stählin is the only source for the story, and it seems unlikely that no one else would have documented such an act of heroism. This, plus the interval of time between these actions and Peter's death seems to preclude any direct link. However, the story may still, in part, contain some grain of truth.

In early January 1725, Peter was struck once again with uremia. Legend has it that before lapsing into unconsciousness Peter asked for a paper and pen and scrawled an unfinished note that read: "Leave all to...." and then, exhausted by the effort, asked for his daughter Anna to be summoned.^[19]

Peter died between four and five in the morning 8 February 1725. An autopsy revealed his bladder to be infected with gangrene.^[6] He was fifty-two years, seven months old when he died, having reigned forty-two years.

Issue

Name	Birth	Death	Notes
By Eudoxia Lopukhina
HIH Alexei Petrovich, Tsarevich of Russia	18 February 1690	26 June 1718	Married 1711, Princess Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel; had issue.
HIH Alexander Petrovich, Grand Duke of Russia	13 October 1691	14 May 1692
HIH Pavel Petrovich, Grand Duke of Russia	1693	1693
By Catherine I
Pavel Petrovich	1704	1707	Born and died before the official marriage of his parents.
Peter Petrovich	1705	1707	Born and died before the official marriage of his parents.
Catherine Petrovna	7 February 1707	1708	Born and died before the official marriage of her parents.
HIH Anna Petrovna, Tsesarevna of Russia	27 January 1708	15 May 1728	Married 1725, Karl Friedrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp; had issue.
HIM Empress Elizabeth	29 December 1709	5 January 1762	Reputedly married 1742, Alexei Grigorievich, Count Razumovsky; no issue
HIH Maria Petrovna, Grand Duchess of Russia	20 March 1713	27 May 1715
HIH Margarita Petrovna, Grand Duchess of Russia	19 September 1714	7 June 1715
HIH Peter Petrovich, Grand Duke of Russia	15 November 1715	19 April 1719
HIH Pavel Petrovich, Grand Duke of Russia	13 January 1717	14 January 1717
HIH Natalia Petrovna, Grand Duchess of Russia	31 August 1718	15 March 1725
Stillborn daughter	1720	1720
HIH Peter Petrovich, Grand Duke of Russia	7 October 1723	7 October 1723

In popular culture

The tomb of Peter the Great in Peter and Paul Fortress

Monument to Peter the carpenter in St. Petersburg

Peter has been featured in many books, plays, films and games including the poems The Bronze Horseman, Poltava and the unfinished novel Peter the Great's Negro, all by Alexander Pushkin. The former dealt with a famous equestrian statue, raised in Peter's honour. Alexey Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote a biographical historical novel about him, named Pëtr I, in the 1930s, which, along with its adaptations, became a major influence on Peter's subsequent portrayals.^{[citation needed]}

There is a 1976 film, Skaz pro to, kak tsar Pyotr arapa zhenil (How Tsar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor), starring Aleksey Petrenko as Peter, and Vladimir Vysotsky as Abram Petrovich Gannibal. Much of the film shows Peter's attempt to build the Baltic Fleet. The 2007 film, Sluga Gosudarev, depicts the unsavoury brutal side of Peter during the campaign.

Peter was played by Maximilian Schell in the 1986 NBC miniseries Peter the Great.

A character based on Peter plays a major role in The Age of Unreason, a series of four alternate history novels written by American science fiction and fantasy author Gregory Keyes. Peter is one of many supporting characters in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle - mainly featuring in the third novel, The System of the World.

See also

• Government reform of Peter I
• History of the administrative division of Russia
• Reforms of Peter I of Russia
• Russian battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy, a Russian Navy battlecruiser named after Peter the Great
• Russian history, 1682-1796
• Tsars of Russia family tree

Notes

1. ^ Dates indicated by the letters "O.S." are Old Style. All other dates in this article are New Style.
2. ^ Riasanovsky, Nicholas (2000). A History of Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 214. 
3. ^ Riasanovsky, Nicholas (2000). A History of Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 218. 
4. ^ Riasanovsky, Nicholas (2000). A History of Russia, sixth edition. p. 216. 
5. ^ Riasanovsky, Nicholas (2000). A History of Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 216. 
6. ^ ^{a b} Hughes, John R. (2007). The seizures of Peter Alexeevich. Epilepsy & Behavior (10:1). pp. 179–182. 
7. ^ Riasanovsky, Nicholas (2000). A History of Russia, sixth edition. p. 221. 
8. ^ Riasanovsky, Nicholas (2000). A History of Russia, sixth edition. p. 218. 
9. ^ Farquhar, Michael (2001). A Treasure of Royal Scandals, p.176. Penguin Books, New York. ISBN 0739420259.
10. ^ Riasanovsky, Nicholas (2000). A History of Russia, sixth edition. p. 220. 
11. ^ "Russian Grand Priory — Timeline". 2004. http://www2.prestel.co.uk/church/oosj/timeline.htm. Retrieved 2008-02-09. 
12. ^ O.L. D'Or. "Russia as an Empire" (PHP). The Moscow News weekly. pp. , Russian. http://english.mn.ru/english/issue.php?2002-46-3. Retrieved 2008-03-21. 
13. ^ Basil Dmytryshyn, Modernization of Russia Under Peter I and Catherine II (Wiley, 1974) p.21
14. ^ Oudard, Georges; Atkinson, Frederick (translated) (1929). Peter the Great. New York: Payson and Clarke. p. 197. 
15. ^ ^{a b c} Riasanovsky, Nicholas (2000). A History of Russia, sixth edition. p. 224. 
16. ^ Basil Dmytryshyn, Modernization of Russia Under Peter I and Catherine II (Wiley, 1974) p.18
17. ^ Basil Dmytryshyn, Modernization of Russia Under Peter I and Catherine II (Wiley, 1974) p.10-11
18. ^ Bain, R. Nisbet (1905). "Peter the Great and his pupils". Cambridge University. http://history.wisc.edu/sommerville/351/CMHPeter.html. Retrieved 2008-02-09. 
19. ^ The 'Leave all..." story first appears in H-F de Bassewitz Russkii arkhiv 3 (1865). Russian historian E.V. Anisimov contends that Bassewitz's aim was to convince readers that Anna, not Empress Catherine, was Peter's intended heir.

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Peter I of Russia

• Bushkovitch, Paul A. (January 1990). "The Epiphany Ceremony of the Russian Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries". Russian Review (Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review) 49 (1): 1–17. doi:10.2307/130080. http://www.jstor.org/stable/130080. Retrieved July 5, 2009. 
• Gordon, Alexander (1755). The History of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia: To which is Prefixed a Short General History of the Country from the Rise of that Monarchy : and an Account of the Author's Life. London and Aberdeen: F. Douglass and W. Murray. http://books.google.ee/books?id=kv0EAAAAYAAJ&hl=en. 
• Graham, Stephen Peter the Great: A Life of Peter I of Russia called The Great Biographical work with 367 pages, plus Index. Not Illustrated, other than a black and white frontispiece portrait of Peter the Great.
• Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1998 (hardcover, ISBN 0-300-07539-1; paperback, ISBN 0-300-08266-5).
• Hughes, Lindsey. Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives (Studies in Russian and Eastern European History). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001 (hardcover, ISBN 0-333-92009-0).
• Hughes, Lindsey. Peter the Great: A Biography. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2002 (hardcover, ISBN 0-300-09426-4); 2004 (paperback, ISBN 0-300-10300-X).
• Massie, Robert K. Peter the Great: His Life and World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980 (hardcover, ISBN 0-394-50032-6); New York: Ballantine Books, 1981 (paperback, ISBN 0-345-29806-3); 1986 (paperback, ISBN 0-345-33619-4); New York: Wings Books, 1991 (hardcover, ISBN 0-517-06483-9); London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001 (paperback, ISBN 1-84212-116-2). Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Peter
• Troyat, Henri. Peter the Great. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987 (hardcover, ISBN 0525245472

Regnal titles
Preceded by Feodor III	Tsar of Russia 1682–1721 with Ivan V 1682–1696	Succeeded by —
Preceded by —	Emperor of Russia 1721–1725	Succeeded by Catherine I
Preceded by Frederick I	Duke of Estonia and Livonia 1721–1725
Russian royalty
Preceded by Ivan V of Russia	Heir to the Russian Throne 1682–1682	Succeeded by Alexei Petrovich

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v • d • e Tsareviches of Russia 1st Generation (Rurikids) Dmitri Ivanovich · Ivan Ivanovich · Feodor I Ivanovich · Vasili Ivanovich · Dmitry Ivanovich · 2nd Generation none 1st Generation (Godunovs) Feodor II Borisovich 1st Generation (Romanovs) Alexei I Romanov · Ivan Mikhailovich · Vasili Mikhailovich 2nd Generation Dmitri Alekseyevich · Alexei Alekseyevich · Feodor III Alekseyevich · Simeon Alekseyevich · Ivan V Alekseyevich · Peter I Alekseyevich 3rd Generation Alexei Petrovich* · Alexander Petrovich* · Paul Petrovich* · Peter Petrovich* · Paul Petrovich* · Peter Petrovich* * raised to Grand Ducal rank in 1721

Persondata
NAME	Peter the Great
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Romanov, Pyotr Alexeyevich; Peter I
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Emperor of Russia
DATE OF BIRTH	=9 June 1672
PLACE OF BIRTH	Moscow
DATE OF DEATH	8 February 1725
PLACE OF DEATH

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