Peter the Great: How the Tsar Changed Russia

Imagine this scene for a moment. The sovereign of a vast power, who is supposed to be seated on a throne in gold and receive ambassadors, instead secretly hires himself out under an alias at a foreign shipyard as a simple worker and, with his own hands, in sawdust and sweat, hews planks to learn how to build ships. No other tsar, before or since, would have even dreamed of such a thing. But Peter the First actually did it, seriously, transforming himself for over half a year into a carpenter named Peter Mikhailov. And if one were to seek a single image that reveals Peter completely, it is this: a tsar with an axe in his hands. A man who did not order the country to change from somewhere above, but instead grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and dragged it along, not shying away from dirty work and not sparing anyone in the process, least of all himself.

Anyone searching for "Peter the Great" or "Peter the Great Russia" will find a dozen stately portraits of him in armor and robes, none of which explain the most important thing. And the most important thing is that this man transformed the country so drastically and forcefully as no one had before him. The debate over whether he was Russia's savior or tormentor has not subsided in three centuries. It is this debate, not a list of his victories, that deserves examination, because Peter is interesting precisely for his ambiguity, and it is for this ambiguity that he has been both cursed and deified.

Tsar with an axe in his hands

To understand where such a tremendous, almost inhuman energy came from, one must recall that the throne came to him strangely and early. As a boy, he was proclaimed tsar along with his sickly brother Ivan; a special double throne was even crafted for the two of them, but their sister, Princess Sophia, actually ruled for them. And while intrigues unfolded at court, young Peter was left to himself and spent his time in the German Quarter, among foreigners, and by the water, tinkering with boats and toy regiments. There, far from the stuffy Kremlin routine, there grew not a ceremonious Moscow sovereign, but an impatient, curious, handy man who always wanted to touch, take apart, and remake everything in his own way.

This trait defined his entire reign. Peter did not know how, nor did he wish, to rule in a orderly fashion, sitting with his hands folded. He got involved everywhere himself: he himself shaved the boyars' beards, he himself pulled out courtiers' aching teeth, he himself led regiments into battle, and he himself stood at the lathe. Power for him was not a privilege to preside, but a tool with which he began to reshape the country, which seemed unwieldy to him, and he reshaped it with the fury of a man convinced he was right and unaccustomed to being contradicted.

Why did the Tsar go to Europe as a simple carpenter

The very journey we began with was not a royal whim, but a state matter, and it was called the Grand Embassy. In 1697, the young tsar sent a large diplomatic mission to Europe to seek allies against old enemies, and he went with it himself, but not at the head, but in the shadows, under the name of a simple bombardier, Peter Mikhailov. The ruse was poorly disguised; the two-meter-tall tsar was recognized everywhere, and yet it gave him the freedom to do what was not proper for a sovereign: to learn a trade with his own hands.

And he studied avidly, like an obsessed man. In Holland, he learned carpentry and shipbuilding in the shipyards; in England, he visited museums, mints, and workshops, and even looked into Oxford and the Greenwich Observatory, asking everywhere how things worked. He brought back not so much a military alliance, which, frankly, he didn't really secure, but something far more explosive: a burning, impatient conviction that Russia needed to be turned toward this new world immediately, at any cost. It was with this thought that he returned, and after his return, the country was destined to shudder.

Beards, calendar, and a new country

He began with things that affected everyone, and were therefore remembered more vividly than other great reforms. As soon as he returned, the Tsar personally began to cut the boyars' long beards and the hems of their old caftans. Those who wished to keep their beards were ordered to pay a special tax, as if for the luxury of living in the old ways. To some this might seem like a trifle, but for a Russian man of that time, a beard was a matter of honor and faith. By attacking it, Peter made it clear: the old life was over, and everything would be broken down, right down to the face.

And he broke them. He moved the start of the year from autumn to January 1st and ordered it to be celebrated in a new way, with decorated trees, so that the very custom of celebrating the New Year in winter originated from him. He founded the country's first printed newspaper, «Vedomosti.» He forced noble youngsters into classrooms, making career advancement dependent on education. And in 1721, he did something unprecedented: he abolished the patriarchate and subjected the church to the state through a special council, the Synod, explaining that there could not be two rulers in the country. Each of these changes individually reshaped the way of life, but together, in a single reign, they transformed the Muscovite Tsardom into a country unrecognizable to itself. The list of his main reforms is best viewed at a glance in a separate table, but their essence is one: Peter did not fix Russia, he reassembled it anew.

A Twenty-Year War

All these changes were not initiated out of a love for novelty, but for one purpose: to make Russia strong and secure its access to the sea, without which a great power was suffocating. For this reason, Peter got involved in the Great Northern War with Sweden, the strongest military power in the north at the time, and this war dragged on for two decades, from 1700 to 1721.

For Russia, it began in disgrace, with a crushing defeat at Narva, and many concluded that the young tsar had overreached himself. But Peter was one of those whom defeat only fires up. He reorganized the army from scratch, cast cannons—legend has it he didn’t even spare church bells—built a fleet from the ground up, and at Poltava in 1709, he utterly crushed the previously invincible Swedes. That battle turned the tide of the entire war, so that by the time it ended in 1721, Russia had gained the coveted Baltic coast and pushed its way into the first rank of European powers. As a reward for this victory, Peter assumed the title of emperor, becoming the figure known to history as Emperor Peter I, and the country transformed from a tsardom into an empire. The course of this long war, from Narva to Poltava and the peace treaty, is best traced in a separate table.

City on an empty lot

The most visible monument to this era was founded by Peter right in the middle of a war, on rotten, marshy land wrested from the Swedes at the mouth of the Neva. In 1703, here, among swamps and mosquitoes, where there was absolutely nothing, he founded a new city and named it in a foreign style, Saint Petersburg. The undertaking seemed insane: to build a capital on the edge of the state, in a swamp, right next to an enemy with whom war was still ongoing.

But that's Peter all over. The city grew on bones, quite literally. Workers driven from all over the country built it, many of whom ended up lying in that damp earth, and the price paid for it was terrible. And yet, from an empty place, in a matter of years, a new, bright, straight capital, laid out in the European style, arose – the very one about which the poet would later say that from here Peter carved a window to Europe. By moving the capital here from old Moscow, the Tsar seemed to declare that the country would now be different too, facing the sea and the West, rather than the familiar past.

The price paid for everything

And here it's time to talk about what is often omitted in enthusiastic accounts of the great transformer. For all these ships, victories, and cities were paid for at an exorbitant, cruel price, and the entire country paid it. To find money, people, and hands for endless wars and construction projects, Peter squeezed all the life out of the people, burdened them with taxes, drove them to work, and broke resistance mercilessly. He suppressed the Streltsy revolts with such ferocity that he himself, according to testimonies, participated in executions. The country surged forward, but this surge was bought with blood and anguish, and many paid with their lives for the brilliance of the new empire.

The darkest and most personal page of this price is the fate of Tsarevich Alexei, Peter's own son. The elder heir was nothing like his father; he was quiet, devout, and alien to his father's reforms, and in the end, unable to bear his father's oppression, he fled abroad. Peter cunningly brought him back with promises, forced him to abdicate the throne, and then brought him to trial. Under torture and interrogation, the case went from bad to worse, and in the summer of 1718, after a death sentence, the Tsarevich died in the Peter and Paul Fortress under circumstances that were never clarified. Was he truly guilty of a conspiracy, did the torture break him, or was he secretly eliminated – no one knows for sure. It is only clear that the father, while reshaping the country, did not spare his own son, and in this grim story, Peter is fully revealed, with his greatness and his terrible readiness to go to the end.

Genius or tyrant

Here we are, back to where we started. Who was Peter, really – Russia's savior or its tormentor? And the most honest answer is that he was both, simultaneously, and there's no contradiction in that. He truly pulled the country out of centuries of isolation, gave it a navy, an army, science, cities, and a place among the great powers, and in that sense, he was a genius unlike any other. And he achieved all this through violence, bloodshed, and the exhaustion of an entire people, forcefully breaking the established way of life and men alike, and in that sense, he was a tyrant. It's no wonder that assessments of him to this day diverge into complete opposites: some see him as the greatest of Russian rulers, others as a man who, by force and blood, broke the natural course of the country's life.

And, perhaps, it's pointless to argue which assessment is correct, because both are correct at the same time. Peter is great precisely because these two truths do not negate each other in him, but strengthen each other. He remains a huge and unsettling figure in history, a man who loved Russia as best he could, meaning ruthlessly, and transformed it so drastically that we live in a country largely shaped by him.

Why should a child outside of Russia know this?

For a child growing up away from Russia, Peter the Great is usually reduced to the Bronze Horseman and a couple of textbook lines: a great tsar who founded Petersburg, and that's it. But behind this lies a captivating and far from straightforward story about a whirlwind of a man who forcibly dragged an entire country into a new era and paid a terrible price for it. To understand such a figure means learning to see not flat labels of "great" or "terrible" in history, but the living, contradictory truth, and this skill will be useful far beyond the story of Peter.

At Palme School, we strive to present history this way: in depth, through characters, actions, and their consequences, rather than through a string of dry dates. Understanding who Peter was, what he did to the country, and why he is still debated today is for us as much a lesson in language and culture as reading or grammar, because without this layer, language remains flat. We teach children aged four to seventeen, separately bilingual and for those, To whom is Russian essentially a foreign language, online, in small groups, for forty minutes.

You can find out if this is right for your child for free. The school offers two trial lessons. The first is an introduction to a methodologist, who will assess your child's level and explain the program. The second is a real lesson in a group, with a teacher and other children. This way, you can immediately see how your child feels in a Russian environment and what interests them the most.

What is worth remembering

Peter the First remains in history as the man who reshaped Russia more drastically than anyone else. He traveled to Europe as a simple carpenter, returned with a vision to overhaul the country, and set about the task without hesitation: he shaved beards, changed the calendar, built a navy and cities, won a twenty-year war with Sweden, founded Petersburg on the swamps, and transformed the tsardom into an empire. However, the country paid a terrible price for this leap forward, with blood, hardship, and lives, including the life of his own son. For this reason, people have been debating Peter for three centuries: was he a genius or a tyrant? The most accurate view here is that both truths coexist within him. And we still see the outcome of his work today, as in many ways, we live in the Russia he largely shaped.