Standing nearly seven feet tall, and possessed of terrifying brute strength, Peter the Great was a giant of Russian history in more ways than one. To many, he was the great moderniser: a bold and innovative thinker, whose vision of a more enlightened Russia – based partly on his travels as a young man – saw the country attempt (not always successfully) to abandon ancient traditions and instead embrace dramatic reforms of its institutions and manners along more rationalist, scientifically informed Western European lines. In this view, Peter’s elegant new capital of St Petersburg – his ‘Window on the West’, built at enormous cost on the remote, mosquito-ridden Baltic coast of the Gulf of Finland – takes centre stage as the greatest memorial to the Father of Modern Russia.
To others – perhaps more discomfitingly – he was the great tyrant: a high-living autocrat, whose well-documented depravity and unshakeable will to power were matched by quite astonishing reserves of cruelty and a degree of callousness that would allow him to torture and execute even his own son. In this view, it is his personal involvement in the merciless and sadistic mass torture of hundreds of members of the streltzi (the country’s outdated and troublesome military elite) which is most emblematic of his despotic 43-year reign.
Both views of Peter are, of course, correct in their own way. But as we discover, it is likely that his ‘greatness’ would not have echoed so resoundingly down the centuries without the addition of a third quality – his genius as a military commander – nor that his example would have provided the template so eagerly adopted by all of Russia’s subsequent so-called ‘strongman rulers’, up to and including the present day.
In our special feature for this issue, Stephen Roberts first traces the life of this towering figure in Russian history, then looks in detail at the Battle of Poltava – the 1709 clash of arms in modern-day Ukraine that established Russia for the first time as a major power on the European stage.
This is an extract from a special feature on the making of Russia from the April/May 2025 issue of Military History Matters magazine.
Read the full article online on The Past, or in the print magazine: find out more about subscriptions to Military History Matters here.