Peter the Great

Peter Alekseyevich Romanov was born in Moscow on May 30, 1672, the son of Tsar Alexis and his second wife, Natalya Naryshkina ^[1]. Alexis died when Peter was three, and the boy's childhood unfolded amid a bitter feud between his mother's family, the Naryshkins, and the relatives of his father's first wife, the Miloslavskys.

That feud turned violent in 1682. After the death of Peter's half brother Tsar Fyodor III, the ten-year-old Peter was proclaimed tsar, but the Moscow musketeers known as the streltsy rose in revolt within weeks. Peter watched from the palace steps as soldiers killed several of his mother's kinsmen and supporters ^[2]. The settlement that followed made Peter joint tsar with his sickly half brother Ivan V, while their half sister Sophia governed as regent.

Pushed to the margins of court life, Peter grew up largely at Preobrazhenskoye, a royal estate outside Moscow. There he drilled companies of playmates in mock battles, units that later became the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards, the core of a new Russian army ^[1]. He also spent long hours in Moscow's foreign quarter, learning shipbuilding, navigation, and artillery from Dutch, Scottish, and German residents. The discovery of an old English sailing boat, which he learned to handle on nearby waters, sparked a lifelong obsession with the sea ^[3].

Sophia's regency collapsed in 1689 when a confrontation between her supporters and Peter's ended with the regent confined to the Novodevichy Convent ^[2]. Peter's mother and her allies managed affairs for several more years, and only after Natalya's death in 1694, followed by Ivan V's in 1696, did Peter rule alone in practice as well as name.

His first major test came against the Ottoman Empire. A campaign to take the fortress of Azov failed in 1695 because Russia had no fleet to blockade it from the sea. Peter responded by building galleys and barges through the winter at Voronezh, and Azov fell in 1696 ^[3]. The lesson stayed with him: Russia needed ships, and it needed the skills to build them.

In 1697 and 1698 Peter did something no Muscovite ruler had done before. He traveled through western Europe with the so-called Grand Embassy, working incognito, though hardly unrecognized at over two meters tall, as a ship's carpenter in the Dutch yards at Zaandam and Amsterdam and later at the English royal dockyard in Deptford ^[4]. He hired hundreds of European engineers, officers, and craftsmen for Russian service. News of a fresh streltsy revolt cut the journey short. Peter returned to Moscow, crushed the rising, and had hundreds of musketeers executed, ending the corps as a political force ^[2].

Anyone asking what Peter the Great achievements amounted to usually starts with the Great Northern War. In 1700 Peter joined Denmark and Saxony-Poland against Sweden, then the dominant power in the Baltic, hoping to win Russia a seacoast. The war opened in disaster: Charles XII of Sweden routed a much larger Russian force at Narva in November 1700 ^[5].

Peter rebuilt. He melted church bells into cannon, introduced systematic conscription, founded schools of navigation and artillery, and reformed the army along European lines. While Charles campaigned in Poland, Russian troops took the Neva valley, and in May 1703 Peter founded a fortress city at the river's mouth: Saint Petersburg, built at great human cost on the marshes and made the capital in 1712 ^[1]. The decisive battle came at Poltava in Ukraine on June 27, 1709, where Peter's reorganized army destroyed the Swedish field force and sent Charles fleeing into Ottoman territory ^[5].

The war dragged on another twelve years, fought increasingly at sea, where Russia's young Baltic fleet won its first major victory at Hangö in 1714. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 gave Russia Livonia, Estonia, Ingria, and part of Karelia, securing the Baltic coastline Peter had sought from the start ^[5]. That autumn the Senate conferred on him the titles Emperor and the Great, and the Tsardom of Russia formally became the Russian Empire ^[1].

Alongside the war came an administrative revolution. Peter replaced the old boyar duma with a governing Senate, created administrative colleges on Swedish models, subordinated the church to a state department called the Holy Synod after refusing to appoint a new patriarch, and in 1722 issued the Table of Ranks, which tied noble status to state service rather than birth ^[6]. He introduced the poll tax, promoted mining and manufacturing in the Urals, founded Russia's first newspaper and its Academy of Sciences, reformed the alphabet and the calendar, and famously taxed beards to push the elite toward European dress ^[6].

Peter was married at sixteen, at his mother's insistence, to Eudoxia Lopukhina. The marriage produced a son, Alexei, but little affection, and in 1698 Peter forced Eudoxia into a convent ^[1]. Around 1703 he took up with Marta Skavronskaya, a Lithuanian peasant captured during the Baltic campaigns. She converted to Orthodoxy as Catherine, married Peter privately and then publicly in 1712, and bore him numerous children, of whom only two daughters, Anna and Elizabeth, survived to adulthood ^[7]. In 1724 Peter had Catherine crowned empress consort, an unprecedented step.

The tsar's habits startled contemporaries. He worked with his hands throughout his life, cutting timber, pulling teeth, turning wood on a lathe, and earning certification as a shipwright; carpenter appears among his occupations in most accounts of his life ^[4]. He drank hard, kept a raucous mock court called the All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod that parodied church ritual, and preferred small houses and plain dress to palace ceremony ^[3].

The darkest chapter of his private life concerned his heir. Alexei, raised by the family Peter had rejected, resented his father's reforms and fled abroad in 1716. Lured back with promises of pardon, he was interrogated, implicated in an alleged conspiracy, and condemned to death. He died in the Peter and Paul Fortress in June 1718, almost certainly from the effects of torture during the investigation ^[7].

Victory over Sweden did not end Peter's campaigning. In 1711 a war with the Ottoman Empire went badly: surrounded on the Pruth River, Peter bought his army's escape by returning Azov ^[5]. A more successful expedition against Persia in 1722 and 1723 briefly won Russia territory along the western and southern shores of the Caspian Sea ^[1].

At home the pace of decrees never slackened, but the succession remained unsettled. In 1722 Peter claimed the right to name his own heir, discarding hereditary custom, yet he never used it. His health, worn down by decades of exertion and heavy drinking, deteriorated from urinary and bladder disease in his final years ^[3].

Peter died in Saint Petersburg on January 28, 1725, in his fifty-third year, without designating a successor ^[1]. The guards regiments he had created settled the question, backing his widow, who reigned as Empress Catherine I.

Any serious Peter the Great biography ends with an argument, because Russians have argued about him ever since. Admirers credit him with making Russia a European great power, giving it a navy, a modern army, new industries, secular schools, and a window on the Baltic. Critics answer that the transformation rested on serf labor, crushing taxation, and coercion, and that Saint Petersburg itself was raised on the bones of conscripted workers ^[6].

The institutional shadow was long. The Senate, the Synod, and the Table of Ranks structured Russian government and society into the nineteenth and, in the last case, the twentieth century. Catherine II claimed his mantle, commissioning Etienne Falconet's equestrian monument, the Bronze Horseman, unveiled in 1782 with the inscription linking the two rulers; Pushkin's 1833 poem of that name fixed the statue at the center of Russian debates about state power and the individual ^[8].

Historians continue to weigh the balance. Lindsey Hughes described a ruler who fused genuine technical curiosity with autocratic ruthlessness, while Robert Massie's widely read 1980 life presented the reign as a sustained act of will that changed both Russia and Europe ^[7][3]. Whatever the verdict, the facts of the reign, a coastline won, a capital built, a state rebuilt from the chancelleries to the church, explain why the question of who was Peter the Great still opens most histories of modern Russia.