Peter the Great

Peter the Great: The Tsar Who Went to Work

In January 1698 a man six feet eight inches tall arrived at Deptford, moved into a house borrowed from the diarist John Evelyn, and set about learning to draw ship plans. He visited the Royal Mint four times, looked at Venus through John Flamsteed's telescope at Greenwich, and toured the Woolwich arsenal. He was the ruler of Russia, he was twenty-five, and he had come to Europe to learn a trade.

A Childhood Interrupted by Massacre

He was born on 9 June 1672 in Moscow to Tsar Alexis and Natalya Naryshkina. When Feodor III died in 1682, the Miloslavsky and Naryshkin families went to war over the succession and the streltsy — the elite musketeer corps — rebelled that spring, murdering some of Peter's relatives and friends. The Boyar Duma settled it by proclaiming the ten-year-old Peter joint tsar with his half-brother Ivan V. A hole was cut in the back of the double throne so that an adult could whisper to the boys from behind. Real power went to his half-sister Sophia, who ruled as regent for seven years while Peter and his mother were pushed out to Preobrazhenskoye.

Toy Armies and a Broken Boat

Exile was the making of him. He drilled "play regiments" of companions in mock battles. At sixteen he found an English boat, had it restored and taught himself to sail, then built ships on Lake Pleshcheyevo. He took mathematics and military science from foreign tutors — Frans Timmerman, Karsten Brandt — and haunted Moscow's German Quarter, befriending merchants and picking up Dutch. In 1689, when Sophia conspired with the streltsy against him, he fled in the middle of the night to the monastery of Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra, gathered support and forced her into a convent. His mother died in 1694, leaving him an independent sovereign at twenty-two; Ivan's death in 1696 left him sole ruler.

The Grand Embassy

In March 1697 he set out on an eighteen-month Grand Embassy to Western Europe — the first tsar to leave Russia in more than a century. He travelled under a false name and fooled nobody, being far taller than anyone around him. In Amsterdam he worked four months in the Dutch East India Company's shipyard, helping build an East Indiaman. What he took from it was a criticism: Dutch carpenters, he judged, worked "too much by eye," without proper drawings. That is why England mattered more. At Deptford he studied naval architecture on paper, examined how a fleet was organised, and left with shipwrights and specialists in his baggage.

Blood and Beards

The embassy ended abruptly with news of a second streltsy revolt in June 1698. General Gordon had crushed it by the time Peter got home in September, which did not save the survivors: 4,600 were imprisoned, about 1,182 tortured and executed, and Peter ordered the bodies publicly displayed. The corps was disbanded and Sophia shut in the Novodevichy Convent.

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Then came the cultural decrees, applied with the same absolutism. Courtiers and officials were ordered into European dress and out of their beards; those who kept them paid a beard tax of a hundred roubles a year. In 1699 he moved New Year from September to January and stopped dating the calendar from the creation of the world, so that 7207 became 1700. In 1703 he founded Russia's first newspaper and reformed the alphabet.

Narva to Poltava

The military record began badly and stayed instructive. He failed at Ottoman Azov in 1695, went away and built a fleet at Voronezh, and took the fortress in July 1696 with thirty ships. Against Sweden his first attempt at the Baltic ended in catastrophe at Narva in 1700, where Charles XII attacked through a snowstorm. Peter's response was to melt church bells into cannon. He took Nöteborg in 1702, cut off Charles's reinforcements at Lesnaya, and on 27 June 1709 destroyed the Swedish army at Poltava — a victory that ended the assumption that Russia could not fight. He was capable of disaster still: the Pruth campaign of 1711 forced him to hand back the Black Sea ports, and the Ottomans nicknamed him Mad Peter. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 gave Russia Ingria, Estonia, Livonia and much of Karelia.

A City on a Marsh

In 1703, in the middle of that war, he founded Saint Petersburg on Hare Island in the Neva, beginning with the star-shaped Peter and Paul Fortress designed by Domenico Trezzini — guns commanding the river, never once fired in anger. To build the city he forbade stone construction anywhere else in Russia, forcing every mason in the empire to come to him. He lived on the site in a three-room log cabin with no fireplace. By the end of his reign the Baltic fleet carried 28,000 men in 49 ships and some 800 smaller vessels.

The Machinery of the State

He rebuilt the government as deliberately as the harbour. The Governing Senate of 1711 took charge of judicial, financial and administrative affairs; collegiums replaced the old central offices in 1718, deciding by majority vote. The Table of Ranks of 1722 fixed precedence by merit and service to the emperor rather than by birth, stripping the boyars of their inherited standing; it survived until 1917. He founded the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation in 1701, and in 1724 both the Academy of Sciences and a university at Saint Petersburg. When the patriarchate fell vacant in 1700 he refused to fill it, and in 1721 abolished it outright, replacing the patriarch with a Holy Synod under a lay Procurator.

The cost was paid at home. His son Alexei, suspected of plotting against him, was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress in 1718, tortured into a confession, convicted of treason, and died in his cell of the injuries. In 1722 Peter abolished male-line succession altogether. He had been proclaimed Emperor of All Russia the previous November, with the added titles "the Great, Father of His Country."

Why Peter Is Called a Genius

Peter inherited his throne, so nothing about his position was earned. What was his own is the diagnosis and the method. He grasped that Russia's weakness was technical and institutional rather than moral, and that the remedy could be gone and fetched — then went and fetched it with his own hands, four months in a Dutch shipyard and months more in English dockyards.

The cognitive quality is the pairing of two things that rarely sit together: a strategic view long enough to reorganise a state around a coastline it did not yet own, and a technical curiosity granular enough to notice that Dutch shipwrights built by eye while the English worked from drawings, and to conclude that the drawings were the transferable part. James Cracraft calls the result a cultural revolution that remade the constitution of the empire; Britannica credits him with making Russia a great power; Stalin admired it as an attempt "to leap out of the framework of backwardness."

The counter-case is severe. The reforms were imposed by an autocrat who had 1,182 men tortured to death and their corpses exhibited, and who let his own son be tortured to death for disloyalty. The historian Y. Vodarsky argued in 1993 that Peter's methods "put a brake on Russia's progress and created conditions for holding it back for one and a half centuries." Both things are true. He was a genius of application, and the application was brutal.

Legacy

He died on 8 February 1725, aged fifty-two, after two years of bladder disease, having reigned forty-two years; an autopsy found gangrene. Legend has him reaching for a pen and managing only "Leave all to ..." He is buried in the cathedral inside the fortress he built first. What he left was a navy where there had been none, a capital on a swamp that faced Europe, a civil service ranked by service rather than blood, an academy of sciences, and an empire the West could no longer afford to ignore.