Tsar Peter the Great Dies, Leaving a Legacy of the Westernization of Russia: February 8, 1725

This text comes from our book, All Ye Lands.

When Tsar Alexis’s son, Peter, was crowned tsar in 1696 at the young age of 24, he was determined to change the course of Russian history forever. He wanted to make Russia a truly great power, and to do this he thought he had to make Russia like the countries of western Europe. Even before becoming tsar, he had set about to learn everything he could about the West. After he became tsar, he disguised himself as a simple sailor and went on a “Great Embassy” to Germany and England. In this disguise, he worked as a stonemason, a carpenter, a blacksmith, and a dentist. He even kept a bag of human teeth with him to prove his skill and talent at dentistry.

An engraving of Tsar Peter the Great

In his youth, Peter had shown great curiosity about machines, and spent hours learning about them from the practical German and Danish technicians of Moscow’s “German” quarter. There he learned an important idea that he used in his later reign—that people should be rewarded for what they could do, not because they belonged to noble families. As tsar, he chose his army officers from the most able of his soldiers, whether or not they were aristocrats.

The chief goal of Peter’s reign, thus, was to force Russia to accept westernization. Russians had to become like western Europeans in every area of life. For instance, the tsar ordered Russian men to shave their beards and to wear Western clothes. Those who refused could be stopped on the streets and forcibly shaved by the police. They were made to pay a “beard tax” if they refused to shave their beards. Peter’s harshness in forcing westernization on Russia led to the outbreak of civil wars all over Russia, which he put down, one by one, over the years of his reign.

Tsar Peter made himself absolute master of the Russian Orthodox Church. When the patriarch of  Moscow died in 1700, Peter did not replace him. Instead, he placed the Church under a body of bishops headed by a layman appointed by the tsar. This he called the Holy Synod. So under Tsar Peter, the Russian Church became another branch of the Russian government. By Peter’s command, priests who heard remarks against the government during confession were required by law to report them to the police.

Peter wanted to make Russia a world power. He conquered the last Mongol forces in the Crimea and built a fleet on the Black Sea, which had been under the complete control of the Ottoman Turks. In the north, he made war on Sweden, which at that time controlled the coast of the Baltic Sea. In 1703 he seized the mouth of the Neva River, which flows into the Baltic Sea, and began to build a city there, which he named St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg was built on swampy ground that had to be drained and filled. It had to be both a seaport and a fortress. To build his city, Peter forced thousands of Russian peasants to work in the cold and unhealthy swamps. He starved, beat, and drove them to their deaths for the sake of the great project.

St. Petersburg. View of the Troizkoi Bridge by J. Schroeder

Peter wanted St. Petersburg to be a western European city. It was to be his capital and his “Window on the West.” To be able to keep a better eye on his nobles, he forced them, on pain of death or exile, to move to St. Petersburg and to build stone mansions there for themselves and their families.

In a series of wars, Peter defeated the Swedes, the Turks, the Poles, and his own rebellious Cossacks. His military adventures added modern Lithuania and Latvia to Russia and pushed the Russian border farther south. By building up a modern army and navy, Peter made Russia one of the great powers of Europe. For all of these achievements, this tsar has gone down in history as Peter the Great.

Peter’s legacy was the westernization of Russia. Russia did become a world power, but at the heavy cost of widespread suffering and deep division among the Russian people. Russian aristocrats, who lived off the labor of their serfs, learned to speak French and to dress in French and English fashions. They traveled to foreign capitals and behaved more like western Europeans than Russians. Their peasants, on the other hand, who spoke Russian, lived in hopeless poverty. Russian townsfolk remained bound by the caste system and lived a life of little comfort and even poverty. Russian religious faith was as strong as ever, but many had lost trust in the Church. The Christian Faith remained the religion of the poor while many nobles practiced their religion without really believing in it.

So it was that, when Peter the Great died in February 1725 (at the age of 53), few of his people sincerely mourned for him.