Titans of History

PETER THE GREAT

1672–1725

I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself.

Peter I of Russia was a physical giant—6 feet 8 inches tall—and dynamic ruler whose astonishing political acumen, colossal ambitions, ruthless methods and eccentric energy, transformed Russia into a European great power, vastly expanded his empire and founded the city of St. Petersburg. He is often described as a pro-Western reformer but that is simplistic: he was certainly a reformer and advocate of Western technology but at heart he was a brutal autocrat, the ultimate personification of the hero-monster.

He grew up in a rough school: like other practitioners of political autocracy such as Tsar Ivan the Terrible and King Louis XIV, his early years were dangerous and uncertain, overshadowed by terrifying coups and intrigues. Peter was the son of the second tsar of a new dynasty—the Romanovs—and when his father Alexei died, his weak and sickly eldest brother Fyodor succeeded to the throne for a few years, but powerful boyar (noble) families effectively ruled in his stead. On Fyodor’s death in 1682, the next two brothers in the family, Ivan V and Peter I succeeded jointly—Ivan too was unfit to rule and both were very young so Russia was ruled by their mother as regent. The revolt of Moscow’s old court guardsmen, the streltsy, enabled Peter’s formidable sister Sophia to seize power and rule in the boys’ name.

Peter developed into an extraordinary figure—amazingly tall though with a somewhat small head, highly intelligent and indefatigable though sometimes affected by twitches and strange illnesses—he may have been epileptic. From an early age he was fascinated with all matters military, naval and technological, creating his own mini-army with regiments made up of his friends and cronies.

In 1689, Peter removed his sister and started to rule in his own right. He also married and had children. One of his first actions was attack the Ottomans and the Crimean Tartars to the south, hoping to capture Azov, but this enterprise failed and it was not until 1696 that he managed to take the city.

In 1697, he set off on his fact-finding adventure—the Grand Embassy—around western Europe, where he visited Holland and England amongst many other places and studied shipbuilding. The trip was bizarre—part technological research, part political investigation, part road trip and part hooliganish stag party.

Peter was already a law unto himself: such was his supremacy as tsar in Russia that he often dressed as an ordinary sailor or soldier and liked in his inner circle to appoint other courtiers as “mock-tsar” so that he could relax while his henchmen indulged in the wild orgies of drunkenness and debauch that literally killed some less energetic participants.

After eighteen months away in western Europe, the streltsy, the overmighty Kremlin guards, rebelled and Peter rushed home to organize their destruction—here was an opportunity to create his own army. Never shy of shedding blood with his own hands, he personally executed and tortured many in a public orgy of violence. But he also embarked on the famous reforms that were designed to update and empower Russia to take its place amongst the great powers of Europe: beards were banned, new army regiments trained, government reorganized and Peter probed northwards toward the Baltic, controlled by Sweden, southwards toward the Black Sea, under Ottoman rule, to find a port for Russia.

His Great Northern War, designed to win an outlet on the Baltic, and fought all around that sea and in Ukraine and Poland, was a mammoth, destructive and long struggle with the Swedish empire, in particular its brilliant warrior-king Charles XII. It began with a defeat at Narva, but Peter went ahead anyway and founded St. Petersburg. Ultimately his sheer will and vision would make it Russia’s capital city. The war raged for many years and culminated in Charles XII’s invasion of Russia—a project that ranks with the invasions of Napoleon and Hitler in its scale, ambition and hubris. In one of the decisive battles of European history, Peter defeated the Swedes at Poltava in 1709. St. Petersburg was safe but the war continued for another decade even after the death of Charles XII.

In 1710, Peter, always impatient and overambitious, attacked the Ottoman empire in the south, but his campaign very nearly ended in disaster when he and his army were surrounded by the Ottoman grand vizier and his army: he was lucky to escape.

Nonetheless his armies had conquered much of the Baltic shores and he concentrated on his reforms and new capital. His allies in these enterprises were often his own creations whom he raised to the highest wealth and aristocracy, such as his crony and friend, a former soldier and pie seller, Alexander Menshikov, whom he made into a prince and field marshal.

His great love was one of Menshikov’s former mistresses, a young Livonian girl named Martha Scavronskaya—renamed Catherine by the tsar—who became Peter’s most trusted ally, consolation and mother of more children including his daughter, the future empress Elizaveta. Much earlier, he had divorced his first wife Eudoxia with whom he had fathered his heir, Tsarevich Alexei. The boy represented the old Muscovite interests that Peter loathed and tensions between them represented political as well as personal rifts. Terrified, the prince took refuge with the Habsburg emperor in Vienna.

Furious, humiliated and threatened, Peter had him hunted down and lured home with promises of safety. Meanwhile, in Russia, anyone implicated in Alexei’s escape was impaled, tortured and executed, often by the tsar himself. When Alexei arrived home, he was instantly arrested and tortured to death by his own father. Peter remained a dangerous and paranoid tyrant: when the brother of one of his former mistresses Anna Mons became too close to his wife Catherine, he was beheaded and his pickled head presented to her.

In 1721, he finally won his peace with Sweden and with it more territories around the Baltic. Peter was declared emperor of Russia, the first Russian monarch to add this title alongside the traditional honorific of tsar. Yet his murder of his son and his failure to appoint a male heir left an uncertain legacy. He was first succeeded by his peasant-born empress, who ruled as Catherine I, backed by Peter’s friend Prince Menshikov. But her death brought Peter’s young grandson, a child controlled by Muscovite conservatives, to the throne as Peter II. The unstable succession led to decades of palace coups and female rulers such as his daughter Elizaveta and, later, the wife of his grandson, Catherine the Great.

Probably Russia’s greatest tsar, and the prototype of the ruthless yet revolutionary Russian ruler whose divergent characteristics could inspire figures as diverse as Catherine the Great, Stalin and Vladimir Putin, this remarkable life force died in 1725, at only fifty-two years old.