Peter the Great Turns Russia Westward
Peter I forces Western reforms on Muscovy, defeats Sweden, builds St Petersburg and proclaims the Russian Empire.
- Russia in the Age of Peter the Great — Lindsey Hughes, Yale University Press (1998)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
Peter became tsar as a child in 1682 and took real power in the 1690s. After travelling incognito through Holland and England in 1697–98 to learn shipbuilding, he set about remaking his country. He built a navy, reorganised the army, ordered nobles to shave their beards and wear European dress, created a ranked civil and military service (the Table of Ranks, 1722) and replaced the Patriarch with a state-run Holy Synod.
- Russia in the Age of Peter the Great — Lindsey Hughes, Yale University Press (1998)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
His war with Sweden, the Great Northern War of 1700–21, turned on the victory at Poltava in 1709 and won Russia the Baltic coast. On marshland taken from Sweden he founded St Petersburg in 1703 and made it the capital, building it with forced labour at the cost of many thousands of lives. In 1721 he proclaimed himself emperor. Russia had become a European great power, but serfdom deepened to pay for it, and a gulf opened between a Europeanised elite and the peasant majority.
- Russia in the Age of Peter the Great — Lindsey Hughes, Yale University Press (1998)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
Peter’s reign was continued in the same spirit by Catherine II (“the Great”, 1762–96), who annexed Crimea in 1783 and took a large share of the partitioned Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
Why it matters today
Peter set the pattern of modernisation from above, imposed fast and at great human cost. The nineteenth-century argument between "Westernisers" and "Slavophiles" about whether Russia should copy Europe or follow its own path started as an argument about him, and it has never really ended.