Prologue: Court politics and reform

Summary

The reign of Peter the Great was one of the great turning points in Russian history, and indeed of European history as well. In so far as Peter's transformation of Russia increased the speed of its rise to the status of a great power, he affected the whole history of western Eurasia, laying the foundations of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the advance of Russia into Transcaucasia and Central Asia. His transformation of the Russian state, moving it toward a bureaucratic monarchy of the European type, did not outlast the Romanov dynasty, but his transformation of Russian culture was permanent. Russia entered the sphere of West European culture, including that of secular political thought.

These were momentous changes. But how did Peter do it? For thirty years, from the mid-1690s to his death in 1725, he gave thousands of orders which added up to fundamental changes in Russian life. Many of the orders were not popular, and in the early years, roughly from the musketeer revolt of 1698 to the end of the Bulavin revolt in 1708, there was much opposition from the common people of Russia. As we shall see, for virtually the whole of the reign the other pole of society, the ruling elite, was rife with discontent, discontent aroused as much by Peter's reliance on a small circle of favorites (especially Menshikov) as by Peter's larger goals.