4
“MONEY IS THE ARTERY OF WAR”
Timeline
| 1613 | Mikhail Romanov crowned as tsar |
| 1639 | Russians reach the Pacific |
| 1649 | New law code, the Sobornoye ulozheniye |
| 1652–66 | Nikon is Patriarch of Moscow |
| 1654 | Pereyaslavl Accords |
| 1654–67 | First Northern War |
| 1666–7 | Great Moscow Synod anathematizes the Old Believers |
| 1670–71 | Cossack rebellion led by Stenka Razin |
| 1682 | Abolition of mestnichestvo |
| 1682 | Peter the Great crowned as co-tsar at age nine |
| 1689 | Treaty of Nerchinsk |
| 1696 | Peter becomes sole ruler |
| 1697–8 | Peter’s “Great Embassy” to Europe |
| 1700–21 | Great Northern War |
| 1722 | Introduction of the Table of Ranks |
| 1722–3 | Persian Campaign |
| 1725 | Death of Peter |
Zurab Tsereteli’s Peter the Great (1997)
© Mark Galeotti
Towering 98 meters (322 feet) above the Moskva River, between the hipster bars of the former Red October chocolate factory, the posh houses on Prechistenskaya Embankment and the statue gardens of the Muzeon Arts Park, stands Tsar Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), immortalized in a thousand tons of steel, bronze and copper. It is a gloriously ugly monument of the man atop a galleon, erected in 1997, during the time when Yuri Luzhkov was mayor of Moscow. In between approving the demolition of historic buildings so that they could be replaced with tacky shopping malls, Luzhkov commissioned it from Zurab Tsereteli, his favorite sculptor and architect. Most Muscovites loathe it. For a start, it was probably not intended to be Peter. Although Tsereteli now denies it, the prevailing view is that this was actually a design intended to mark the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492. When no suitably gullible and tasteless American sponsor could be found, Tsereteli simply swapped out the heads, and pitched it to Luzhkov as a statue of Peter, to mark the 300th anniversary of his founding the Russian navy. The rest is history.
Except what kind of history? On one level, it is deeply ironic that Moscow has ended up with such a monument to a tsar who so disliked the city that he built himself a new capital to the north—St. Petersburg. (When, after Luzhkov was forced from office, Moscow offered it the statue, the St. Petersburg city council replied that they didn’t want to “disfigure a great city.” They meant their own.) Secondly, that the Russian “Peter” is actually the Italian Cristoforo Colombo under a thin disguise is also quite a powerful metaphor for many of the reforms he imposed on Russia. He was a modernizer, a Westernizer even, but instead of seriously tackling the underlying reasons why Russia was different, many of his measures simply addressed the superficialities. Russian aristocrats, for example, were forced to cut their bushy beards or else pay a special tax. But affecting European-style shaved chins doesn’t necessarily bring European-style thinking.
Thirdly, though, the very focus on Peter the Great as one of the defining figures of Romanov Russia is understandable. Much like the statue, he towered over those around him both figuratively and literally. He was a veritable giant, over 2 meters tall (6 foot 8) in an age when the average man was 1.7 meters (5 foot 6). He had a prodigious enthusiasm, forever seeking to learn new skills, from dentistry (his unfortunate courtiers had to let him practice on them) to clock-making. He had a genuine curiosity for the outside world, even traveling across Europe, a first such venture for a Russian ruler. Nonetheless, in many ways Peter was at most a culmination of a process. Many of his reforms were rooted in the practices of his Romanov predecessors, and his policies were often dictated not by his own will but by the circumstances in which he found himself.
Finally, just like the twist in fate, taste and patronage that saw the largest monument to Peter in the city he despised, all this was steeped in paradox. He was a Russian nationalist who ordered his own aristocrats to look more European, who adopted ideas and technologies from all across the West, and yet who in effect codified Asiatic despotism, making service to the state the sole basis of status. The more he tried to cherry-pick the most appealing or useful aspects of Europe for Russia, the more he had to find ways to justify this in terms of a Russian divine mission and special place in the world. This was the greatest fiction of all, that modern European culture at the top of the system could coexist with Eurasian feudalism below, best epitomized by the building of his new capital, St. Petersburg. An airy, modern city designed by French and Italian architects—and built by half a million serfs dragooned from across the country, tens of thousands of whom would die.
Enter the Romanovs
From the Time of Troubles emerged not only the new Romanov dynasty, but also a new, cohering narrative: that Russia would be prey for its many foes if it did not have a single, powerful ruler around whom all the classes and peoples of the nation could—and must—unite. This became the basis for the Russian Empire, and with it a growing national self-image as both beleaguered fortress amidst a sea of enemies and also guardian of everything that was good and proper, from the true faith to, later, legitimate regimes facing the chaos of anarchy and rebellions. With this, though, came the inevitable tension: how to secure the borders, assert Russian interests and maintain order at home, without adopting Western technologies? And could those technologies be adopted without associated social and even political changes? The answer was ultimately that they could not, but for centuries the tsars would certainly try. This would thus be a time of growth and strength mixed with peril and paradox, and the seventeenth century would be one of wars abroad and risings at home, but also of imperial expansion and growing national self-confidence.
Mikhail (r. 1613–45), first of the Romanov tsars, may have been chosen for his blandness, but his reign proved unexpectedly productive (in part, admittedly, because of the role played by his domineering father, Filaret). His actual coronation was delayed by weeks because Moscow, battered by successive wars and rebellions, stripped and starved, was in too bad a state to accommodate it. By the time of his death in 1645, though, he had secured peace with Sweden and Poland, reorganized some of the army along Western lines (something that would lead to rebellion by the traditional streltsy under Peter) and overseen the expansion of Russian influence into Siberia by a motley and often murderous array of Cossack mercenaries, fur-trading merchant-adventurers and foresighted aristocrats. In 1639, a band of Cossacks even reached the Pacific Coast, while behind them would come stockades, tax collectors, missionaries and smallpox, decimating the thinly scattered indigenous population of Siberia more viciously than any gun or blade.
The challenge would always be how to balance the urge to expand and compete with maintaining stability at home. After Mikhail, Alexei (r. 1645–76) acquired the soubriquet “the Most Quiet” for his subdued manner, but faced a tumultuous time of wars with traditional enemies Poland and Sweden and new challenger Persia, as well as a Cossack rebellion that saw towns burn along the Volga and a short-lived Cossack republic, followed by the Pereyaslavl Accords that saw the largest of their communities—and with it much of what is now Ukraine—brought under the rule of the tsar. A schism ripped at what had seemed one of the most stolid and solid of institutions, the Russian Orthodox Church. Alexei was clearly bedeviled by the usual Russian dilemma. On the one hand, he resented the growing influence of foreigners, and their new and different ideas. In 1652, for example, he set up a separate part of Moscow, the “German Quarter” (the Russian word for German, Nemets, being used for all foreigners), as a ghetto into which to confine their embassies, their mansions and their churches. In 1675, he banned his court from affecting Western clothes or styles, even in private. Just as wealthy Russians were excited by the exotic and the foreign, though, the Russian state needed these outsiders, their money, their technologies and their military experience. Notably, Alexei may have despised Western ways, but he made Patrick Gordon, a Roman Catholic Scottish mercenary, a tutor for his son, Peter, one of many foreigners who played a crucial role in shaping the passions and interests of the young tsarevich (prince).
Belief and Believers, Old and New
This tension was especially evident in the church. If for the secular authorities the lesson of the Time of Troubles was that weakness at home meant vulnerability abroad, within religious circles there was a growing body of opinion that viewed that era as evidence of God’s dissatisfaction with the Russian people and the impurity of their liturgy. In 1652 one of their number, the eloquent and forceful Nikon, became Patriarch of Moscow and All the Rus’. By all accounts he had been reluctant to take on this position, but once he had, he plunged straight into reforms intended to, as he saw it, purify a church that had deviated too far from its Greek Byzantine origins.
Contemporary Greek rites and liturgies replaced those in place (if you valued your life and freedom it was best not to mention the irony that, by then, Russia’s were actually closer to those of old Byzantium). Newer styles of icons were banned and Nikon’s followers broke into churches and houses across Moscow to seize and burn them. Those who painted them—and the evolution of the artistic styles of these paintings of saints and religious scenes had been one of the glories of early modern Russian culture—had their eyes gouged out and were then paraded through the city. Churches believed to have deviated too far from Byzantine standards were demolished. Even how the name Jesus was to be written and the exact way in which the sign of the cross was made were revised. Former allies who were horrified by the direction and severity of these changes were excommunicated. Piety, Nikonian-style, was imposed by violence, fear and synod courts.
Tsar Alexei had long been entranced by Nikon—he had gone down on bended knee in 1652 to beg him to take the position in Moscow—and at first he was virtually the tsar’s right-hand man and stand-in. In the early years of the off-and-on First Northern War against Poland and Sweden, which began in 1654, when Alexei was away at the front, Nikon was effectively regent in Moscow. Over time, though, this relationship would become increasingly tense. Whatever Nikon may have said about bowing to the secular authority of the crown, conversely he thought the crown ought to genuflect to the church on matters spiritual. This included going against the terms of the Sobornoye ulozheniye, the new law code issued in 1649, which undercut the authority of the church and reduced its privileges.
Facing resistance from boyars and clergy alike, and a new distance from the tsar, Nikon tried to take a leaf out of Ivan the Terrible’s book, symbolically tossing aside his patriarch’s robes and abandoning Moscow for a monastery. He waited for his critics to come to their senses and beg for him to return. He waited in vain. For eight years, Nikon and the church remained at an impasse, until the Great Moscow Synod of 1666 in which a conclave of the most powerful clergy and respected theologians finally gathered—in some cases, it is said, induced to do so by generous payments in rubles and furs—to try and settle the crisis. The synod squared this circle by damning Nikon, stripping him of his authority and sending him to a distant monastery under guard, while accepting his reforms. In the great schism known as the Raskol, the sundering, those traditionalists who resisted these changes, the so-called Old Believers, were declared apostate and would be persecuted for most of the next three centuries: only in 1971 would the Moscow Patriarchate finally lift its proscriptions on them.
Debates over the precise hand gestures used to cross oneself may seem trivial, and hardly the reason for generations of rancor and sectarianism, murder and exile. However, the religious debates of the Nikonian era reflected a wider fear that, bit by bit, Russia was losing its traditions, its unique place in the world, its soul. The irony is that the “reformers” were seeking to return Russian spiritual life to something it had never been: they mistook contemporary Greek rites for true Byzantine ones, and were trying to “recreate” a perfect separation of church and tsar that would have been recognized by neither an emperor in Constantinople nor a prince in Kiev. Once again, appeals to history were actually invoking artful (if probably unknowing) reinventions of Russia’s past.
Two Tsars for the Price of One
Meanwhile, the secular state continued to edge toward modernization. Alexei’s immediate successor, Fyodor III (r. 1676–82), established the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, Russia’s first institution of higher learning—almost 600 years after the founding of the universities of Bologna and Oxford. Perhaps most striking was his abolition in 1682 of the mestnichestvo system, which meant that aristocrats’ positions were defined by birth and status. Instead, he encouraged a more meritocratic system in which jobs went to those best suited to them (or by royal appointment: even a reforming tsar was going to have his favorites). The old pedigree books, painstakingly encyclopedic genealogies that were used to determine every aristocrat’s precise position in the hierarchy—seating someone a little too low down the table than their status demanded could even trigger a duel—were symbolically and ceremonially burned.
Fyodor died that same year. He left no heir so, in theory, the next in line was his younger brother, Ivan, last surviving son of Alexei’s first marriage. The 15-year-old Ivan was a chronic invalid, though, and according to many equally disabled intellectually. The boyars feared what could happen if Russia had a weak tsar and instead looked to his younger half brother by Alexei’s second wife, nine-year-old Peter. However, they had not considered the traditional rivalries between the Miloslavsky and Naryshkin families, from which had come Alexei’s first and second wives, respectively, and the ruthless passions of Ivan’s older sister Sophia Alexeyevna. Russia might not have been ready for an empress, but Sophia was ready for the next best thing.
She and the other Miloslavskies stirred up a rebellion among the streltsy, spreading rumors that Fyodor had been poisoned and Ivan strangled. Already angry at the erosion of their privileges and the rise of new, Western-style regiments, the conservative streltsy were easy to turn. As the Moscow mob seized the opportunity to riot and loot, the Boyar Duma (assembly) scrabbled for a compromise. As ever, pragmatism won out, and was then hurriedly robed in the mantle of invented tradition. Ivan (r. 1682–96) and Peter (r. 1682–1725) were crowned as Russia’s dvoyetsarstvenniki, double tsars, with Sophia as regent. A special double throne was built for the two youngsters, a duplicate of the ceremonial Cap of Monomakh hurriedly made so each had one for the coronation, and Byzantine ritual plundered and heavily edited to justify such an unusual move.
For just over six years, Sophia, supported by her ally and maybe-lover Prince Vasily Golitsyn, ran the country. Ivan dutifully spent his days in prayer, pilgrimage and court pomp, and Peter spent his time at the royal estate of Preobrazhenskoye, not least setting up his so-called “play army.” A band of retainers and fellow teenagers, over time it became a genuine force a hundred, then three hundred strong. Sophia’s regency saw the signing of the unrealistically optimistically named Eternal Peace Treaty with Poland (1686), which ratified Russia’s possession of the ancient capital of Kiev, and at the other end of the sprawling empire, the Treaty of Nerchinsk with China (1689). It also saw disastrous campaigns in 1687 and 1689 against the Crimean Khanate in which Russia was defeated not so much by enemy force of arms as the logistical challenges of mounting military expeditions at the borders of what had become such a large state.
Meanwhile, Sophia either could not or would not declare herself tsarina, empress. Instead, she had to watch as Ivan sickened and Peter became increasingly willful. In 1689, the 17-year-old Peter had decided that enough was enough. He demanded that Sophia step aside. Though she again sought to raise the streltsy against him, she faced the majority of the boyars, most of the streltsy and Peter’s “play army”: by then, two fully fledged companies, with their own cavalry and artillery. Perhaps equally importantly, even Ivan was willing to go along with Peter.
So Sophia was forced into the Novodevichy monastery, something of a traditional genteel jail for unwanted aristocratic womenfolk, from Ivan the Terrible’s daughter-in-law to Boris Godunov’s sister. Perhaps the ever-planning Sophia had predicted even this fate, as she had made a point of having the ironically named “New Maidens’ Monastery” renovated during her regency. And while Peter was technically still a ward of his mother until he was 22, and co-monarch with Ivan until the latter’s death in 1696, in practice he was now the tsar. Power was his; but what did he want to do with it?
Building the Petrine State
Much is known about Peter; much less is truly understood. He was charismatic and energetic, but suffered from seizures and facial tics. His motto was “I am a student and I seek teachers” and he was certainly willing to be taught—he did not lead his “play army,” but enrolled as a mere bombardier so as to learn warfare from the ground up—but his interests were in matters not intellectual but practical. He was proud of his country, but more desperate for the respect of foreigners than of his own people. He had struggled for power, but once he had it, he seemed uninterested in many aspects of rule, instead indulging himself in the duties that pleased him, neglecting those that did not.
Peter had played as soldier when still a boy, had been terrified by the brutal rising of the streltsy in 1682 (his uncle Ivan Naryshkin and Artamon Matveyev, the statesman who had proposed his coronation, were both hacked to death before his eyes), risen to power thanks to his personal army and seen Sophia’s legitimacy critically undermined when her favorite, Golitsyn, failed in not one but two Crimean expeditions. Military power was, to Peter, vital for his own security, central to Russia’s and also, frankly, fun.
He may have neglected the ceremonial that had occupied so many tsars’ lives and paid only lip service to any spiritual role. However, he had an intensely practical perspective on statecraft and realized that military strength was based not just on the valor of a country’s soldiers but the quality of the technology, logistics and governance behind them. Whether or not he could be considered a modernizer in every sense is open to debate, but he felt an urgent, passionate drive to make of Russia a great power, a respected power, and that meant wars, wars that he wanted to win. At the time, Russia was not considered a serious military player. Reflecting its place in the Western worldview as something no longer Asiatic, but not yet European, the Austrian envoy Johannes Korb acidly noted that “none but the Tatars fear the armies of the tsar.”
Peter wanted to change that, but that would cost: “Money,” he noted, “is the artery of war.” Even by the standards of early modern states, in days when social security meant charity at best, starvation at worst, the Russian state became in many ways simply a support mechanism for military forces. It has been estimated that by 1705, the share of the central budget they consumed was anything from 65 to 95 percent. This demanded a working bureaucracy, an efficient tax system, and a more disciplined and professional state machine. Peter set out to build them through a sweeping series of reforms.
Serfdom, so long a challenge for Russia’s rulers, was made more inflexible, for the state depended on the peasants working, building and fighting. Hundreds of thousands of peasants—out of a total population of perhaps 7.5 million—would be conscripted for Peter’s wars and his construction projects, so they could not be allowed to flee south or east. New fines were introduced for concealing runaways, while from 1724, peasants were not even allowed to travel from their own district without a passport. Meanwhile, new taxes rained down on them, on everything from beehives to cucumbers.
Not that the nobility were exempt from being forced to bend to Peter’s demanding program. The abolition of mestnichestvo had begun to change the way status and position in Russia were determined, but in 1722, Peter introduced the Table of Ranks, which represented a fundamental revolution in the foundations of Russian aristocracy. Henceforth, all noblemen who wanted to rise within the system had to move up the 14 ranks by service, promotion and ability. Of course, favoritism, wealth and birth would still have an impact in practice, but the theory was now that the nobility held their place, power and privileges only insofar as they served the state. Equally important was that state functionaries promoted to a certain rank acquired noble status; become a collegiate assessor in the civil service, for example, or a prime major in the Life Guards, both 8th Rank positions, and you became a hereditary aristocrat. Under mestnichestvo, status determined your job. Now, your job determined your status—and in their own comfortable way, the nobility were effectively made serfs of the state.
This even applied to the church. For example, an igumen—an abbot—was a 5th Rank position, equivalent to a state councilor or a brigadier. Nikon had sought to clarify the hazy overlap between church and state by making the former independent of the latter. Peter’s solution was the opposite, in effect to make the church another department of government. This was not just about power, but money. The church held vast lands and generous tax exemptions, and Peter’s wars, his nascent navy, his reorganized army, all of these greedily demanded funds. Church properties came under the control of the state, which eagerly squeezed the church for cash. Much of the revenue earned from this most conservative and even xenophobic of bodies would be spent not just on reforms, but on reforms inspired by foreigners.
Peter on Tour
© Helen Stirling
From the first, Peter had been fascinated by outsiders. Along with the Scotsman Patrick Gordon, the Swiss mercenary Franz Lefort was one of the abiding influences of his childhood. (To this day, a neighborhood in southwestern Moscow close to where the German Quarter used to be is called Lefortovo, in his honor.) The boat considered by tradition to be the “grandfather” of the Russian navy was an English-style sailing boat found by Peter in the village of Izmailovo, repaired by a Dutchman. His first mistress was the German Anna Mons. Instead of traditional long Russian caftans, he favored German coats made with English cloth, and in 1700 he decreed that Moscow’s nobility and civil servants ought also to dress Western-style.
The most dramatic expression of this enthusiasm was the “Great Embassy.” In 1697, he set out on an 18-month tour of Swedish Livonia, the Netherlands, England, the German states and Austria. He notionally traveled incognito as “Peter Mikhailov,” but this was a thin fiction, really just a characteristic excuse for him to dodge the most tedious of protocol, carouse at will (and he did) and get his hands dirty when he wanted. In part, this was a diplomatic venture, aimed at securing allies against the Ottomans, and at this it was essentially unsuccessful. Europe was consumed with the War of Spanish Succession and few seemed willing to put relations with distant and little-known Russia over more familiar neighbors.
Yet for the curious (and self-indulgent) tsar, it was also an unparalleled opportunity to explore the West, its ways, technologies, vices and virtues. In Holland, he studied shipbuilding and hired the naval architects who would help build his new navy (tellingly, many Russian words relating to shipping and the sea have their roots in Dutch). In England, he likewise sought to learn the tradecraft of naval power and modern monarchy, affirming that it was “happier to be an admiral in England than a tsar in Russia.” Nonetheless, having seen parliament sitting, he concluded that “English freedom is not appropriate” for Russia.
Meanwhile, Russia was being governed by Peter’s trusted right-hand man, his “Prince-Caesar” Fyodor Romodanovsky, as if the tsar were still in the country. In 1698, though, news came of a fresh rebellion of the streltsy. Peter hastened home, although Romodanovsky had suppressed it readily before his return. Nonetheless, Peter was decisive in his response: the streltsy were finally disbanded (they were an antiquated obstacle to his creation of a Western-style army) and over a thousand of them were whipped with the savage Russian leather knout, or broken on the rack, or toasted on iron griddles before being hanged or beheaded, their bodies staked out as a public warning: this was a tsar who would brook no disobedience.
The same authoritarianism was evident in his campaign to apply the lessons he had learned in the West. In 1703, after his armies had captured the Swedish fortress of Nyenskans at the mouth of the Neva River, Peter saw the opportunity to build himself both a seaport for the navy he was building and a capital to allow himself to get away from Moscow and demonstrate that Russia could raise a European-style city. His new capital, St. Petersburg, did indeed turn out to be such a city, built with an eye to Dutch and English planning and laid out by Italian, German and French architects. Yet his “window onto Europe” was built with very Russian methods: tens of thousands of serfs, convicts and prisoners of war were worked to death to give Peter what he wanted. Time itself would bend to the autocrat’s will: in 1699 Peter decreed that Russia abandon the Byzantine calendar, which counted the years from the purported creation of the world, to the Western one based on Christ’s birth. Thus, the 7207th year suddenly became 1700.
Peter at War
Ultimately, though, beards and architecture, church politics and administrative reform were all about war, the modern army and navy that Peter was so desperate to build—and to use. Of the 28 years in which he was sole tsar, 24 were spent at war between the 1700–22 Great Northern War and the 1722–3 Persian Campaign.
In 1698, a major restructuring of the army saw it modernized and expanded. Every year, one peasant was conscripted from every 20 peasant households, serving for life, so when a young draftee left to join the ranks, he was sent off with a funeral service. There were efforts to standardize equipment and professionalize the officer corps (again, often by hiring foreigners), and a renewed push to produce modern cannon, a passion that dates back to Ivan the Terrible’s campaign against Kazan and was reflected in the later Soviet dependence on its so-called “red god of war.”
Peter, obsessed with sailing and shipcraft, realized his dream of, for the first time, giving Russia a navy. By his death, he had built a fleet of 32 ships of the line and more than 100 other vessels. Then again, arguably Russia had not needed a navy before. Only as it began engaging more extensively in maritime trade and contesting northern European hegemony with seafaring powers such as Sweden did this become a priority.
Contest it he did, though, and the Great Northern War was more a string of wars in which combatants came and went, while Russia and Sweden remained the anchors of their respective coalitions. It often had all the elegance of a pub brawl. First Russia was allied with Poland, Denmark–Norway and Saxony, though the latter two had to take a breather for a while until the Swedes lost a major engagement at Poltava. For a while, the Ottomans took the chance to help Sweden give their old enemy Russia a bloody nose, while Hanover and Prussia joined Russia. The British, ever the opportunists looking to prevent any one European nation becoming too powerful, at different times actually supported both sides.
Russia won—or at least Sweden ultimately lost—and established itself as a major power. The Swedish Empire was broken as a military superpower, especially given its relatively small population (of the 40,000 soldiers Charles XII, the “Lion of the North,” marched into Russia, only 543 came home). The double-headed eagle had humbled the lion, and shown that it could not just win a battle but build the kind of military and logistical infrastructure that could sustain a long, hard war. Likewise, the 1722–3 Russo-Persian War showed that an army that had not been able to keep a force in the field against Crimea, could now strike deep into the Caucasus and Caspian regions. With the Persian Empire in decline, Peter needed to prevent the Ottomans taking advantage of the situation and extending their control along Russia’s southern flank.
So this was Peter’s true legacy. He was a war-fighter rather than a state-builder, but he came to learn that to be one, he would need to be the other. His interest in outside ideas was in part rebellion against the society in which he had been raised. He was prone to parody and iconoclasm, and his notorious club of cronies, the All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters, openly and often cruelly mocked Russian institutions from the church to traditional manners. There is certainly no likelihood that he saw modernization in philosophical terms: this was the man who left his own name carved as graffiti into the doorsill of religious reformer Martin Luther’s home. Instead, it was intensely practical. Peter appreciated that a backward Russia was a weak one, and that a weak state was a vulnerable one.
He addressed the immediate needs of administration, tightening the grip of the state on nobility, church and peasantry alike. He was ruthless when challenged; he had his eldest son tortured under suspicion of plotting against him, a torment from which he died. He made of Russia a great power, forcing the West to pay attention to what had hitherto been considered a “rude and barbarous kingdom” (as sixteenth-century English navigator Richard Chancellor had dubbed it). This was reform only insofar as it was needed for security, though, and never sought to be anything more. It was modernization as envisaged by the soldier and carpenter, the shipwright and amateur dentist. It would take another “Great”—Catherine—to tackle modernization of the mind and the soul.
Further reading: Although Robert K. Massie’s very readable Peter the Great: His Life and World (Knopf, 1980) is often considered
the gold standard, I would suggest that Peter the Great by Lindsey Hughes (Yale University Press, 2002) is the best of the many biographies of the man: judicious, well-written and with just the right mix of skepticism and respect. Foy de la Neuville’s A Curious and New Account of Muscovy in the Year 1689 (SSEES, 1994) is one of the more interesting (if not always accurate) primary accounts of the time, written by a Polish envoy, and the text also has the virtue of being freely available online. Considering how far warfare defined Peter’s reign, Peter Englund’s The Battle That Shook Europe: Poltava and the Birth of the Russian Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2013) does a good job of dissecting this particular, crucial engagement and exploring its wider context.