The Rise of Peter The Great

In 1698, a 6’8” Russian giant went on a bender through an English gentleman’s estate. He trashed portraits, burned furniture and drunkenly rammed wheelbarrows through a prize-winning holly hedge. The giant in question was Peter the Great, and this wasn’t just a royal lads' holiday; it was - ostensibly - statecraft. In this episode, Dan Snow is joined by historian Daniel Beer to unpack the life of Russia’s most ruthless moderniser - from dodging Kremlin bloodbaths to building a brand new capital atop a mountain of human bones. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 3:00Dan Snow?

  There is a house full of people and write nasty. That was the desperate plea sent out in the spring of 1698 by a thoroughly horrified English steward, a sort of caretaker. He is writing to his master, who was the famed diarist John Evelyn. And Evelyn had made really a terrible mistake he'd made. He'd rented out his beloved Deptford Estate, Say's Court, to a visiting foreign delegation. And by the time those guests, those foreign guests packed up and left, the place looked like it had been hit by an act from a vengeful god. The scene was biblical. Floors and carpets were so caked in grease and ink that they had to be ripped out and destroyed.

• 3:44Dan Snow?

  Every single chair had been smashed up and fed into the fireplaces. Evelyn's prized portraits, lovely paintings on the wall, have been used for target practice. But their most destructive impulses have been reserved for Evelyn's pride and joy. The garden, in particular, a magnificent holly hedge, 400 feet long, nine feet high, five feet thick. He had lovingly, painstakingly tended to that hedge over the course of many years. He'd written down in 1664 in a book, "Is there under heaven a more glorious and refreshing object of any kind than an impregnable green hedge of holly?" His close friend Samuel Peeps, the diarist, famously called it out as "one of the finest things I ever saw in my life."

• 4:26Dan Snow?

  Clearly, this was an astonishing hedge, must have something to behold. But unfortunately, no one else would behold it, no one else would bask in the glory of this hedge. Because when these foreign guests discovered three wheelbarrows, which was a novel Western technology they'd never seen before back home, they invented a new party game. They loaded each other into these barrows and hurtled each other at top speed directly through the middle of the hedge, over and over again and again, until the prized flora was punched through with holes and battered flat on the ground. Historians have compared the behaviour of these young men to a rock band on an all-inclusive bender. And I think that's a pretty good parallel because the chief lad among them, the man

• 5:10Dan Snow?

  who I suspect was pushing those wheelbarrows faster than anyone else, he was in some ways the rock star of European monarchs. He was the six foot eight, 25-year-old, absolute ruler, Piotr Alexeyevich Romanov. History knows him as Peter the Great, Emperor and Autocrat of all Russia.

• 5:36Dan Snow?

  And as wild as the Deptford Bender was, this wasn't just a rowdy, late 17th century lads' holiday, it wasn't a stag night, a bachelor party. This was politics, this was diplomacy, this was the Grand Embassy, an unprecedented, reasonably undercover espionage, fact-finding mission across Western Europe that would alter the course of global history forever. And Peter wasn't just here to smash up houses. He was in the West to obtain the secrets of Western power. He wanted shipwrights, heavy artillery, anatomy, navigation, telescopes, statecraft. He wanted to mint coins and make soldiers. He wanted to take those ideas home and then through sheer ruthless willpower, rip his

• 6:21Dan Snow?

  medieval kingdom out of the Middle Ages and hammer it into a formidable global superpower. In this episode, we're going to be diving into the staggering, chaotic, terrifying life of Peter the Great. How as a child, he witnessed family members being hurled from the ramparts of the Kremlin? How he fought against enemies at home and abroad? How he tortured his own son? How he forged a myth that still grips modern Russia? And for this, we're joined by Daniel Beer, Professor in Modern European History at Royal Holloway. He's published widely on the social and cultural history of the Russian Empire. He's got particularly interest in crime and punishment, which is going to come in very handy for this particular episode. From the violent childhood trauma that shaped his brutal autocracy, to the founding of

• 7:03Dan Snow?

  St Petersburg, built atop the bones of tens of thousands of forced labourers, and the 21-year-old war that broke one empire and built another, this is the story of Peter the Great. Let's get into it.

• 7:28Dan Snow?

  Daniel, great to have you on the podcast.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  Great to be with you.

• 7:32Dan Snow?

  What does Russia mean? Does Russia exist in the mid 17th century?

• 7:37Speaker 04

  So the term, the Kingdom of Russia is used, although it's conventionally referred to as Muscovy by historians, although that term has already become quite outdated because the Muscovite kingdom has expanded dramatically across the 17th century, principally to Siberia. So it's actually reached the shores of the Pacific.

• 8:00Dan Snow?

  Already?

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Already, yeah.

• 8:01Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  So by the time Peter accedes to the throne, this is already a vast territory. It's covered by a very, very thin human membrane. So we're largely talking about very distant territories, very undergoverned.

• 8:17Dan Snow?

  With a few trappers, with a few European Russian sort of trappers in a stockade, right?

• 8:21Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah. So a network of forts, you know, extracting tribute, principally furs from indigenous Siberian peoples, yeah.

• 8:29Dan Snow?

  But that's so extra, I mean, I always think that's one of the great European spasms of conquest that just goes under the radar. I mean, that's a, and indeed probably the most significant one because it still exists today. But that is a vast imperial project. But then again, I suppose it's, as you say, it doesn't require that much human input, like the French Empire and Canada and America at the time, it's thinly held, it's not costing Moscow that much money.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  No, and I mean, that's what, and actually it doesn't require that much coordination from the state because what pulls a kind of motley collection of sort of mercenaries, hunters, adventurers eastwards is the black gold of the age, fur. So the state doesn't even really need to coordinate this. It steps in increasingly to sort of try to resource and manage it. But this is a bit like the Wild East, you know, people are drawn ever further eastwards by the promise of riches.

• 9:25Dan Snow?

  Okay, so Moscow is both enormous, but in some ways small as well when it comes to European powers, politically small, militarily small, is it?

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Yes, it punches significantly below its weight on the European stage. And that, of course, is the most dramatic transformation of Peter's reign. So, you know, the establishment of Russia as a major European great power, you know, whose sort of interests and ambitions have to be accommodated or all sort of recognised or managed, is, I think, one of the great enduring achievements of his reign. Before Peter comes to power, this is already a state which has overseen tremendous territorial expansion. There are already established and very influential contacts with the West in terms of diplomacy,

• 10:19Speaker 04

  culture, the armed forces and so on. So Peter, I think the image that has kind of come down to us is of a single-minded ruler who grabs hold of a small kind of medieval kingdom by the scruff of the neck and sort of drags it into the modern age. And I mean, there are elements of that, but the story, I think, is more complicated because actually, a lot of what Peter sets about doing at the end of the 17th century, there are already sort of in more sort of putative form, these sorts of things are already happening. So.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  Muscovy starts using Western specialists to rebuild its army in the 1630s. You know, there's already quite a lot of interest in the Russian court with the Western world. Expansion of territory and a desire to be sort of taken seriously geopolitically is already there before Peter comes to power. But he takes hold of these impulses and kind of supercharges them in his reign. And of course, as we'll discuss, his achievements mean that, you know, sort of ambitions are materialized and entrenched in the reign of Peter the Great in such a way that they are still with us today. I mean, they still shape the world in which, you know, we're living today.

• 11:32Dan Snow?

  Extraordinary. I mean, it's an unlikely route to power, isn't it? Because he was a younger son. His father died when he was a child?

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. So Peter is the son of Tsar Alexis's second wife. So he's got three half siblings. The first Fyodor the Third dies in 1682, which precipitates a kind of succession crisis. There's a struggle between the clans of the two wives, the first wife and the second. And this is accompanied by a revolt of the Streltsi. So the word Streltsi then roughly translates as shooters, comes from the Russian verb to shoot. There are a caste of hereditary musketeers who were established by Ivan Terrible in the in the 1550s.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  And when it is announced that Peter will succeed Fyodor because his other half brother, Ivan the Fifth, is described as being infirm in body and in mind. I mean, he's not really cut out to take on the responsibilities of managing a vast realm. The Streltsi rebel and try to ensure that Peter is not crowned Tsar. And this struggle over the succession erupts in extremely bloody violent scenes in the Kremlin where Peter, 10 year old boy, sort of powering behind his mother Natalia Narishkina, sees members of his own family being butchered, thrown from the walls of the Kremlin onto the pikes, you know, of the Streltsi below.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  So the crisis is diffused in that moment when it is agreed that both Peter and his half brother will rule jointly with their older sister Sophia acting as regent. And that diffuses the crisis in the moment. But I mean, I think it's clearly a tremendously traumatic episode for Peter. He and his mother believe that they're going to be killed. He witnesses extraordinary scenes of violence. And so his accession to the throne takes place in this moment of bloody court intrigue. And I think, as we'll probably discuss, you know, this, I think, haunts him.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  It remains with him and it fills him with an absolutely unyielding determination to ensure that this will never happen to him again, but there will be no possible future in which rivals at the court might threaten his life.

• 14:06Dan Snow?

  Interesting, interesting. Tell me about his, the rest of his childhood. I mean, we hear about him as a particularly, he's energetic, but also motivated, desperate to march up and down, have these childlike military exercises going on within the Kremlin.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So most of the next decade, he spends at a family estate, just outside Moscow. So he's slightly, he's slightly marginalized from the kind of the heart of political power in the Kremlin. But as a teenage boy growing up, he's fascinated with soldiers, with field maneuvers. I mean, he has an entourage of young men who he sort of plays war games with and establishes close and enduring relationships with many of them. This period is sometimes seen as a kind of as an incubator for the forms of rule that Peter will embrace and champion later in his reign.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  So many of his young companions go on to become significant figures within his own court. These toy soldiers, as he called them, go on to form the elite guards regiments, the Semenovsky and Preberzhensky regiments. And I think it builds around Peter, a culture of, of getting stuck in, doing things together, developing loyalties through shared experience. And it also, I think, brings with it a kind of impatience with rank and with convention when it's seen to get in the way of practical projects.

• 15:36Dan Snow?

  You mentioned some of those regiments. I'm reminded from stories of later Russian military history, those regiments would remain the elite of the Russian Imperial Army, wouldn't they, until, until the First World War? And then, as I understand it, some of them have been refounded now under Putin.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  Yes, that's right. You know, absolutely, yeah, which is part of the sort of the broader shift in contemporary Russia to kind of exhume and revalidate Tsar's past, yeah.

• 15:58Dan Snow?

  Tells you a lot about it. Okay. How does he take de facto rather than just notional power?

• 16:04Speaker 04

  So his half sister Sophia is deposed in 1689 by Peter's allies. You know, he is by this stage 17, 18 year old. She's actually shown herself to be, I mean, a very, very capable, you know, ruler. I mean, she's kind of cursed by her sex really, because she emerges actually publicly as a significant woman ruler in Russia and, you know, showed a lot of sort of curiosity and sort of dynamism in broadening and deepening Russia's cultural and diplomatic ties with the West. But she is deposed and so from 1689, Peter is effectively ruling on his own.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  He's still got this co-ruler, his half brother Ivan the Fifth. But Ivan, by this time, is already a kind of very marginal figure at the court. I think he spends most of his time sort of praying and fasting and leaves the business of administration and politics very firmly in Peter's hands.

• 17:03Dan Snow?

  And Peter's still a teenager.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's still a teenager. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

• 17:07Dan Snow?

  Amazing. Okay, so then he does something quite extraordinary, not just a pivot to the West, but physically visiting himself. Does this have precedent? What's going on here?

• 17:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Peter launches a cultural, there's like a sort of a major diplomatic mission. It becomes known as the Grand Embassy. And I think its ostensible purpose is to try to shore up support for an anti-ottoman alliance within principally North European states. A few years earlier, 1695, 6, Peter has waged two campaigns in the south. The first, an unsuccessful attempt to capture Azov on the Sea of Azov, been in the news recently, of course. And a year later, he succeeds. So the ostensible purpose of the visit then is this anti-ottoman alliance. But I think really what he's also interested in is touring Western countries to see what

• 18:02Speaker 04

  he can take from them. And I don't think this is a kind of starry eyed adulation of the West. This is a very kind of self-interested transactional view of, you know, what works, what doesn't. You know, Peter wants ships that sail and guns that fire and fortifications that will hold. So he's interested in taking and importing knowledge, ideas, personnel from the West. And he spends in 1697, 98, he spends about 18 months principally in Holland and in England, but he also travels through the German states to Vienna.

• 18:43Dan Snow?

  It's quite confident, isn't it, going abroad after you've known instability and bloodshed within the walls of the Kremlin and uprising? I mean, quite a statement.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  It is, and I suppose it's one that he will come partially, I mean, very nearly comes to regret. Because in 1698, he suddenly has to rush back to, to Moscow because the Streltsi have once again rebelled and Streltsi regiments are marching on Moscow. So, I mean, actually, by the time he gets there, the rebellion has been put down and Peter then oversees an extremely punitive investigation, which results in the torture and killing of lots of the Streltsi and eventually the abolition of their regiments and their absorption into the rest of his army. But yeah, I think it is. And I think it speaks though to his sense of kind of restless curiosity and energy.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  He spent a lot of time growing up in Moscow's German quarter. The Germans are what the Russians call foreigners. So this is the foreign quarter in Moscow. But he spent a lot of time in the company of Scottish mercenaries and Swiss architects and so on. And I think he has a genuine curiosity. He wants to see where they come from, where they have acquired the skills that he sees in Moscow.

• 20:00Dan Snow?

  So speaking of acquiring skills, I mean, the great myth or story or legend about him is that he does, he gets his hands dirty when he's in Holland, when he's in England. I mean, he's, he's learning how to build the ships. Is he disguised as a laborer? Does anyone buy that?

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that's certainly true. So he calls himself Piotr Mikhailov and, you know, he tries to travel incognito, whether a two meter tall Tsar marching around the shipyards of, of Holland or England with a sizable entourage, really passed unnoticed, I think, is probably pretty doubtful. But yes, his version of ruling is like the first engineer of the state. I mean, he prides himself on his own mastery of the skills of shipbuilding, navigation, engineering and so on. So I think this is very much part of the kind of projection of his own power. And I think it also genuinely speaks to his own passions.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  He has a, has a great sort of tactical curiosity. He wants to see how things work. I mean, he is at home in a, in a workshop. And so he spends time in Dutch ports, cities, and then moves to England. And his real interest is in tactical matters. You know, he visits the mint. He wants to see how coins are minted. He learns how to use the, the observatory telescope in Greenwich. He's very much a tactical man who wants to get his hands dirty, as you say.

• 21:29Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Talk about Peter the Great, more coming up.

• 21:36Dan Snow?

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• 24:30Dan Snow?

  It's no surprise on the shipbuilding stuff, I mean, the shipbuilding revolution going at the time, these are the most complicated and exciting objects on earth being created by humans. So you can imagine him just fascinated by that and looking to build a navy, and which we'll come back to. We get this wonderful image of him getting really drunk and smashing the place up in England, don't we? Is that thanks to the source material that we have? Do you think this is how young aristocratic and royal men tended to behave in this period? Or was it something about Peter in particular?

• 24:59Speaker 04

  I think Peter's sort of entourage has been a pretty, I mean, the thing is a bit like a kind of rolling stag do in a way. I mean, it's been a very raucous kind of gathering and it, yes, it moves to Deptford. They're housed at Say's Court, which belongs to John, the writer, cultural figure, John Evelyn, who has apparently constructed the most beautiful garden in all of England, which Peter's crew promptly trashes. You know, I think they're using sort of the portraits for target practice and breaking the furniture and apparently driving wheelbarrows through the hedges and do a great deal of damage, so much so that actually Evelyn has to be compensated by the treasury for, you know, a very substantial sum of money. I mean, I think that there is a sort of slightly more, I mean, I don't want to call

• 25:42Speaker 04

  it serious, but there is, I think it's precisely the irreverent behaviour and the defiance of sort of courtly ritual and propriety and this sort of slightly subversive way of behaving. You know, Peter will often assume identities of much more lowly people, you know, he'll pretend to be a ship's steward or a bombardier or something like that. It has, I think, a kind of political edge. I mean, I think he clearly enjoys this sort of stuff. He's a crankster. But there is something about highlighting his own ability to just spurn the rules, to create new rules of the game, to create an environment in which he is able to decide

• 26:24Speaker 04

  who occupies what position at what moment in time. And if that involves ridiculing, you know, a lofty figure within his own court or elevating somebody of much more lowly origins, he is able to do that because he is the Tsar. So in a sense, it's an affirmation of his own power at the same time.

• 26:40Dan Snow?

  Yes, it's interesting, isn't it? To say the rules have changed, if I wish to present as a shipbuilder today, everyone has to, in a way, deep down, rather than being a sort of democratic thing, it's almost underlining your own total power.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it's a pretend egalitarianism, which is actually doing something very different. Yeah, absolutely.

• 26:58Dan Snow?

  Yeah, how interesting. I mean, it's rare on this podcast to talk about uniqueness because things that are said to be unusual and unprecedented are usually not those things. But it's hard to think of a young European monarch like doing something like this, going on this kind of long apprenticeship, practical, as well as partying, as well as political embassies. And also, as you say, doing some, some big strategy as well, trying to mobilize Northern Europe against the Ottomans. Fascinating. So we'll come on to his foreign policy in a bit, but he gets home, there are reformers through history who think, we'll use all these Western tools and objects and inventions, but we don't want to change anything fundamental about society and religion and culture back home. And yet he's as keen on that as he is on practical shipbuilding.

• 27:42Dan Snow?

  How does he change Russia when he gets home?

• 27:44Speaker 04

  So he does launch effectively a kind of cultural revolution in Russia. I mean, I think that term's got to be, it needs some caveats because of course, the vast majority of the Russian population are peasants and their lives are fundamentally untouched by any of this. And that has its own sort of importance in Russia's kind of story further down the road. But Peter, when he returns to Russia in 1698, so he suppresses this Second Striotsi revolt and then sets about enforcing a kind of Europeanization in appearance and in manners of the Russian elite. So he forces men to shave their beards.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  This might seem a rather trivial point. I have a beard. I wouldn't feel terribly bad if somebody shaved it off. But in Orthodox culture, men with beards are supposed to be men who are presenting themselves in the image of God, you know, in the way that God intended men to look. And so to lose your beard, it has potentially sort of religious implications for those people. So it's hugely controversial. He brings women into public society, so gatherings and balls, whereas in Muscovy they had always been sequestered away from public life. There is an attempt to promote secular printing and learning.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  So he simplifies the civil alphabet in order to promote civil learning. He introduces the Julian calendar and sets the beginning of the year to the first of January. So there is a kind of, an attempt to Europeanize the culture of the Russian elite, to make it look and behave in ways that are more Western. But I still think it's important to remember that Peter has visited England 10 years after the Glorious Revolution. He's visited the Dutch Republic, you know, which is a republic. And yet he comes back from his grand embassy with no interest in ideas of kind of political liberty or constitutionalism and so on. So, so this is not an attempt to copy Western models wholesale.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  This is very much an exercise in kind of cherry picking.

• 29:58Dan Snow?

  Yeah, this is build some frigates, shave some beards, but that we don't want a parliament.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 30:04Dan Snow?

  Interesting. Let's then come on to the military and strategic dimension. I mean, was that always, always at the heart of what he was hoping to achieve? And we've already said Russia's got this vast empire, but he, why did he wish to enlarge it in those particular places in which he sought to do so?

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Well, a principal reason is access to the sea. So Russia doesn't have a port which is navigable for most of the year. And of course, Peter inherits from his predecessors a kind of long-running rivalry with, with the Swedes, who are the dominant Baltic power of the age. And so when the Swedish king dies suddenly, while Peter is on his grand embassy, Peter, together with Augustus the Strong of Saxony, Poland, and the King of Denmark, think that they can strike Sweden while the new king, Charles XII, who is himself a teenager, you

• 31:00Speaker 04

  know, is still not prepared for the burdens and the responsibilities of rule, and that Peter will be able to seize control of the Baltic coastline. So this has enormous strategic value for Russia.

• 31:12Dan Snow?

  So it's so fascinating. So Russia, when Peter comes to the throne, their access to the ocean, the sea, that lifeline to connect to the rest of the world, is up north to the White Sea, you know, Marmansk, Archangel, that, that is Russia's port. That is extraordinary.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and there's still no access to the Back Sea, of course, which, you know, doesn't come until much later. So it's communications, trade, commerce, the ability to project, military power, all of these things are stymied, as Peter would see it, by the lack of a Baltic coastline.

• 31:42Dan Snow?

  And so, people may be surprised to learn, but Sweden had a particularly good 17th century. It emerged from the Thirty Years' War with a significant Baltic Empire. Peter joins a coalition of the willing to try and prize some of that Baltic coast away, but from Sweden to the Danes, Poles, Russians, all sorts.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, and initially it goes disastrously. So Charles XII quickly proves himself to be a formidable military commander and the Russians, in their first major engagement of the war in 1700, are routed at the Battle of Navva. They lose huge numbers of men, all of their artillery is captured, supply, so it's a complete sort of humiliation. But Peter is fortunate in a sense because Charles then turns his attentions westwards and goes on to prosecute the conflict in Poland, leaving Peter a sort of window of time in which he is able to then reconstitute

• 32:41Speaker 04

  his army and begin to build a navy. And I think this is important for his whole reign because the Great Northern War, you know, which lasts from 1700 to 1721, casts an enormous shadow over Peter's reign. I mean, it is the dominant sort of geopolitical episode of his reign. And so many of his reforms are geared towards the prosecution of that conflict. So governmental reforms, administrative reforms, reforms to taxation are all to do with building a kind of fiscal military state that will be able to wage the war. So with the benefit of hindsight,

• 33:21Speaker 04

  it's quite easy to see Peter as having some grand plan of how to modernise the country. But I think the reality is that a lot of the changes that he introduces are sort of policy on the hoof that are driven by the kind of shifting demands of the war.

• 33:37Dan Snow?

  And you said the magic phrase for us long 18th century, it's the fiscal military state, when around Europe, whether it's Prussia, England, Britain, there are states being forged in these gigantic wars that in many cases endure today or certainly the kind of bureaucratic and military innovations usher in the modern world that we recognise. So Russia's very much part of that. Peter does something extraordinary, doesn't he, with the site of what is now St Petersburg. It's Swedish territory, but the Swedes are sort of busy in Poland, and he seizes this little marshy outlet onto the Baltic, does he?

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Yes, that's right. So in the mouth of the Dnieve River in 1703, Peter establishes St Petersburg. So it's essentially a fortress outpost, which he then sets about converting into Russia's new capital.

• 34:27Dan Snow?

  I mean, that's an astonishing statement. I mean, why? How and why does he do that?

• 34:31Speaker 04

  So again, it's folded into the demands of the conflict against the Swedes. So it's power projection into the Baltic for the Russian state. Peter also thinks that it will become, in a sense, like the great Hanseatic city-states along the Baltic coastline. So this will be a great sort of trading point for Russia's economic development. But it is also, I think, partly a political statement about moving beyond the kind of traditional legacy of Muscovy and the icons and the incense and the sort of liturgy and building a modern European empire, which will also be a maritime power. I mean, the city itself,

• 35:13Speaker 04

  the construction of the city tells us a great deal about Peter's reign because it's the kind of city that is built as an extension of his own autocratic will. And it's only possible to build it because Peter is able to conscript hundreds of thousands of labourers to go and toil in this sort of mosquito-infested swampland, digging out canals and building palaces and so on. He is also able to coerce his own elite into moving there, or at least establishing residences there. So in 1710, Peter proclaims St Petersburg, the new capital of Russia. But it is a city that its origins lie within the autocratic system that he's

• 35:57Speaker 04

  in the process of creating. It's not a city that has emerged organically as a result of sort of voluntary settlement and commercial activity.

• 36:10Dan Snow?

  Let's come back to the war. Sweden doesn't actually strike at St Petersburg. It instead invades deep into Russia further south. 1708, 1709, tell me what happens in this Titanic campaign, one of the most important in European history.

• 36:24Speaker 04

  Yes, so Charles XII is convinced that he's been unfairly attacked, his cause is just, and that he will be triumphant, and decides to invade Russia through Poland. And I guess he is in a way the first of a succession of European rulers who have tried to invade Russia as winter is coming and...

• 36:47Dan Snow?

  And he sets the tone. He sets the tone for the rest, doesn't he?

• 36:50Speaker 04

  He does. I mean, at least he can't be blamed with not having learnt from history. I think that's probably cannot be said for his successors. But the Swedes are particularly unfortunate though, because the winter, of course, of 1708, 1709, is, I think, the coldest that Europe has experienced in 500 years. Wine is freezing in Versailles and the canals in Venice are freezing. And of course, the Swedish army is horribly exposed. Its supply lines are stretched out. There's a relief army that's supposed to be bringing provisions, but it never manages to catch up with the force that Charles is leading. And so, in

• 37:30Speaker 04

  the end, the decisive battle happens at Poltava in today's Ukraine. Peter does seem genuinely to have emerged by this point as a very able kind of military commander. I mean, the Russians prove themselves to be a sort of a formidable fighting force and the Swedes are roundly defeated. And Swedish power, of course, in the Baltic, never recovers. So the conflict is brought to a diplomatic end by the Treaty of Nistat in 1721, which legitimises Peter's new Baltic possessions. So essentially, control of a good chunk of the Baltic coastline.

• 38:10Dan Snow?

  We should say he does some fighting up there as well. A bit later on, hadn't he? He'd built his beloved navy eventually and scored a couple of victories against Sweden.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  Yes, that's true. Yeah, in the Battle of Gangut in 1714, where it shows that Peter's shipbuilding project is beginning to bear serious kind of fruit. And the Russians are able to field a navy that beats the Swedes in this decisive sea battle in the Baltic as well. But it's in 1721 then that Peter proclaims himself emperor. And that's the point at which Russia has really now emerged as a major political and military power on the European stage.

• 38:52Dan Snow?

  And what we know as good chunks of Finland and the Baltic States are all incorporated into the Russian Empire.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  Yes, that's right. And their position within the Russian Empire, of course, persists through to 1917. And, you know, there are brief periods of independence and then they are reabsorbed into the Soviet Union after the Second World War before becoming once again independent in 1991.

• 39:19Dan Snow?

  More Peter the Great after this.

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• 41:08Dan Snow?

  How European a phenomenon is autocracy itself? It can't be coincidence that you see Louis XIV doing the kind of things in France that Peter is doing. Is it technology? Is it culture? What is allowing these sure incredibly energetic, charismatic and capable leaders to emerge and build these? Are they new kinds of states? Have people been doing this for a while? Or is there something different going on in this cusp of the early modern period? What's happening around here?

• 41:36Speaker 04

  So a lot of the growth of the state, its increasing bureaucratic reach, its ability to at least educate, shape the behaviour of its own citizens. That's, I think, fairly common. By the beginning of the 18th century, though, I think you have a concentration of power in Russia. It doesn't have an equivalent in most West European states at the time, where power is more, there are other blocks, sort of interest blocks within the polity that need to be accommodated. And I think Peter's ability to kind of force his own elites into certain kinds of behaviour, I think, is pretty dramatic.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  And there is a great deal of discontent, but there is no effective rebellion, of course. So he is able, as an individual, I think, to enforce his own will to an extent that most of his contemporaries across Europe would not be able.

• 42:38Dan Snow?

  So we should allow Peter to be remarkable here. We shouldn't look too closely at the substructural forces. This is, at a large part, an enormous force of personality. And he has agency here.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  I think he does have agency. I mean, obviously, as I said at the beginning, I mean, he's kind of pushing in directions. I mean, he's supported by sections of the Russian elite. And, you know, there are people who are doing extremely well from Peter's territorial expansion and the deepening commercial and cultural ties with the West. But I think the kind of his own personal supremacy and the degree to which he towers as an individual over the politics of early modern Russia, that seems to me to be remarkable.

• 43:21Dan Snow?

  Tell me about his succession woes.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  He was many things. He was certainly a truly awful father. So his son, by his first marriage, Alexei, is a perpetual disappointment to Peter. He thinks that he's not energetic and dynamic and sort of manly enough. You know, he's quite a kind of mild-mannered, bookish character. He's, unlike his father, he's much more enamoured of old Moscow with its tradition and ritual. And Peter is continually hectoring him and reprimanding him and threatening him and saying that, you know, he's never going to make a decent czar. So Peter's obviously kind of concerned very much about his own succession.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  This relationship sort of begins to break down completely in 1715, 1716, and it results in Alexei fleeing Russia. I mean, seeking essentially asylum, if you like, in the Habsburg Empire. So he travels incognito first to Vienna, where he asks for help from his brother-in-law, the Habsburg Emperor, and is then initially hidden away in a Tyrolean castle and then moved on to Naples. And I think the problem for Peter is that he takes this escape of his son from Russia to be an act of betrayal. But I think he's also, and not without reason,

• 44:48Speaker 04

  he is concerned that it is well-known within the Russian elite that Alexei does not agree with many of his reforms. I mean, particularly the cultural westernisation of the elite. And there is this problem about what will happen to Peter's legacy when he dies. And so Peter manages to persuade, using emissaries, he manages to persuade Alexei to return to St Petersburg, but then launches an investigation into what he believes is a conspiracy to overthrow himself and put his son on the throne in his place with the idea that Alexei will then start to kind of undo his legacy

• 45:32Speaker 04

  and reverse many of the reforms that he has introduced. It's true, this is a very violent period in European history. So the use of torture, extremely violent punishments are commonplace. And I think it's just hard to sort of hold these two ideas in one's mind at the same time. Peter is a great leader, but he can also be a violent sadist. And he has his son knouted. So this is a kind of flogging with a very heavy, it's called a knout. So it's a very heavy piece of raw hide, which has been treated so that it just strips the skin from one's back. And, you know, wielded by an executioner who knows what he's doing.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  It can kill a man in a few blows. And Alexei is knouted repeatedly. So his back is a kind of bloodied pulp. And he is also tortured by his own father, having been sentenced to death for treason. And he dies in June 1718, having been tortured. And I suppose, in a sense, you mentioned earlier that, you know, Peter likes to get his hands dirty and get, you know, he likes to be in the workshop and on the lathe and in the shipyard. Well, that's true of the torture as well. You know, he gets personally involved in this. And I think what we see here is, I mean, there is a genuine political problem around the succession. You know, his reforms have been very divisive. He's very concerned that they will be reversed.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  It is true that Alexei has emerged, even though he's not at all a political animal, doesn't really want anything to do with this. But he represents a figurehead for opposing factions within the Russian elite who might seek to undo Peter's legacy. So there's a genuine political problem there. But I think it's hard not to see echoes, or to hear of echoes, of the Streltsi revolt of 1682. This fear of, you know, violent conspirators in the shadows who are plotting his death. And so I think you see this awful kind of merging of a genuine political problem and a kind of family tragedy.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  I mean, he comes, I think, to despise and loathe his own child and to believe that anyone wishing to pull Russia in a different direction is essentially a traitor.

• 47:56Dan Snow?

  God, it's like Frederick William and Frederick II in Prussia as well. Nightmare. Ugh, these relationships. He dies at age 52, Peter, in January of 1725. So without naming a successor.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  No, and to complicate matters, he had decreed in 1722 that the reigning monarch choose their own heir, rather than it passing down sort of automatically through the hereditary order. But he manages to die without naming one. So his crown is initially inherited by his second wife, Catherine, who's a woman of very, very lowly origins, who Peter has married a few years earlier. But this really embeds a kind of dynastic instability within the first half of the 18th century in Russia, which has not really resolved until the accession to the throne through a palace coup of Catherine the Great in 1762.

• 48:53Dan Snow?

  So his legacies are, the last great job of an autocrat is to ensure succession, which so few of them managed to pull off. So he fails to do that. And what sort of Russia does he leave behind? On the surface, as you've said, an astonishingly changed country, a fiscal military state, a state with an army, a more modern army, a modern navy, an expanded empire, a role on the European and the world stage. How else should we think about his reign?

• 49:20Speaker 04

  I think it was also a reign in which those achievements came at a very high price. So there is a tremendous strengthening and entrenching of a coercive state. So serfdom is strengthened under Peter. You know, the introduction of a poll tax means that state officials and landowners now have a vested interest in tying people to the land. Their taxes have to be paid, so you don't want them absconding. A lot of legislation is introduced to capture and punish runaway serfs. A lot of the expansion of the Russian economy

• 50:02Speaker 04

  and of course, the construction of St Petersburg is done through forced labour of varying kinds. And there is, I think, a subordination of the church and of an ability to the state. So corporate bodies are not really allowed to exist that might challenge the power of the throne. So it becomes a much more powerful and much more unchallengeable state that Peter leaves behind. I think another important legacy, you know, which I kind of alluded to a while ago, was about the peasantry, because of course, they are in serfed ever more tightly. I mean, they are bound more to the land now.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  Peter also allows serfs to be assigned to factories. So, you know, they become part of the, kind of the the very early stages of the industrialisation of the Russian economy and kind of metallurgical works and so on in Siberia. They are, those kinds of enterprises are staffed by indentured labourers. But broadly, the peasants have been left untouched by Peter's reforms. I mean, they experience more coercion, they have to pay more taxes, they have to serve for longer in the army as recruits and so on. But their culture is left essentially untouched by Peter's reign.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  And at the same time, the elite has become much more Western in its kind of manners, its appearance. As the 18th century progresses, you know, the elite will start speaking French, you know, by the 1750s. So you have really by the 19th century of what the great Russian socialist Alexander Herzyn calls the two Russians. You know, you've got the Russia of educated, Europeanized, metropolitan sort of elites. And then you've got the common people, the peasantry. And so Peter believed a very kind of divided society, you know, and his legacy, I think, in the 19th century is very contested. I mean, publicly, every Tsar sort of pays homage to Peter and says what a wonderful ruler he was and look at our Baltic possessions and we're a great

• 52:05Speaker 04

  power. But I think within the cultural elite, there are those who see Peter as someone who did important work in dragging Russia towards a kind of Western version of statehood. But the work is incomplete. And then there are those who see Peter's reign as an original sin which has deformed Russia, which has, you know, torn it away from its organic, orthodox culture and has foisted onto it, you know, an alien sort of Europeanized culture. And these debates sort of play out across the 19th centuries. And, you know, the echoes of them are still there today.

• 52:45Dan Snow?

  I was gonna say, it sounds like it's playing out across Vladimir Putin's social media feeds at the moment. I mean, you know, thanks for the military and the territorial enlargement, but we are going to emphasize our bare-chested, bear-wrestling Slavic identity more rather than these soft Europeans.

• 53:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And in a sense, that's continued a sort of trajectory that we saw, you know, under Peter, that you'll take certain bits from the West, you're quite happy with technological innovation, certain ways of running the state, you know, developing infrastructure, that sort of thing. But you're not interested in the kind of political, constitutional ideas that have accompanied those developments in other Western states. Peter still casts a very, very long shadow. I mean, this is territorially, this is the state still that to a large degree Peter built. But I think this question of what Russia's real identity is, you know, whether it's a European power or an Asiatic or a Eurasian

• 53:46Speaker 04

  power. I mean, these are questions, I think, that were posed by Peter's cultural reforms at the beginning of the 18th century. And these questions are still up for grabs. I mean, there is no settled view on this within Russia to this day.

• 54:00Dan Snow?

  Well, Daniel Beer, that was just fascinating. Thank you so much. I enjoyed myself enormously and I hope the audience did as well. Have you got a book out at the moment, Daniel, or one coming up?

• 54:10Speaker 04

  I have a book coming out next year with Penguin, which is about the revolutionary movement in the reign of Alexander II, and it's called The Emperor Hunt.

• 54:21Dan Snow?

  Sounds good. Perhaps we'll get you back on for that.

• 54:23Speaker 04

  That would be great.

• 54:24Dan Snow?

  Thank you very much. Well, see you then.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  Thanks, Dan. Thanks.

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• 55:49Dan Snow?

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