OK, so I want you to imagine, if you can, a man
standing in a crowded room. We're talking the
late 17th century. So already a different world.
A completely different world. And this isn't
just any man. This guy is a literal physical
anomaly. He is six feet, eight inches tall. Six
foot eight. Which, let's be honest, is huge even
by modern standards. Oh, absolutely. But in the
1600s. Right, when the average height was maybe,
what, 5 '5". He's basically an NBA center walking
among, I don't know, toddlers. He's a giant,
a second Goliath. Exactly. And he's not just
standing there calmly. He's twitching. He has
these uncontrollable facial tics, maybe a neck
spasm that jerks his head to the side when he
gets excited or angry. So he's not just imposing,
he's... Unsettling. He is terrifying, he is brilliant,
and he is just vibrating with his energy that
is about to tear his country apart and then put
it all back together again. It is such a striking
image, and it's not a fictional character. We
are talking about Peter I, Peter the Great. The
man himself. And that physical description, the
sheer scale of the man, the nervous energy, the
kind of the violence of his movement, it's almost
a perfect metaphor for his entire reign. It really
is. He was a force of nature that physically
and, you know, figuratively dragged Russia kicking
and screaming out of the medieval era and into
the modern world. Exactly. And that is what we
are digging into today. We are looking at a stack
of historical records, biographical details and
various accounts of his reign to unpack the absolute
paradox of this man. Because he really is a man
of two halves. Completely. On one hand, you have
the enlightened creator, right? The visionary
who built St. Petersburg out of a swamp, who
gave Russia a navy, who brought in science and
museums. All the things that made Russia a European
power. But on the other hand. To get those things,
you have a brutal, and I mean brutal, autocrat.
A man who personally oversaw the torture of his
enemies, who mocked the church in the most grotesque
ways imaginable. And who, and this is the darkest
part, presided over the torture and death of
his own son. Yeah, that part is, it's heavy.
We're definitely going to get there. The mission
for this deep dive is to try and figure out,
was he the savior of Russia? Or was he, as some
of his subjects literally called him, the Antichrist?
It's a question they were asking then and we're
still asking now. So let's go back to the beginning.
Because Peter wasn't born expecting to be the
sole emperor. Not by a long shot. No, far from
it. And to understand Peter, you really have
to understand the chaos he was born into. He
enters the world in 1672. When his father, Tsar
Alexis, dies, the throne doesn't go to Peter.
Right. He had an older brother. He had older
half -brothers. The throne goes to the eldest,
Fyodor III. But Fyodor is sickly, which is a
very common theme in the Romanov line at this
time. And he dies young without an heir. And
that's when things get messy. That's when you
get a Game of Thrones situation breaking out
in Moscow. Suddenly, it's a power vacuum. Right.
You've got these two rival families here. You
have the Moleslavskys, who are the family of
the first wife. And the Norishkins, who are Peter's
mother's family. And this isn't just some polite
disagreement over who should rule. This is blood
in the streets. You're not kidding. No, this
conflict turns violent and it turns violent fast.
We're talking about the Streltsy uprising in
1682. The Streltsy were the elite military corps.
You can think of them as musketeers with a very
strong union and a lot of political leverage.
So not people you want to upset. The last people
you want to upset. And they revolt, fueled by
rumors that the Norishkins had poisoned the previous
Tsar. They storm the Kremlin. And Peter, Peter's
just 10 years old. 10. I'm going to pause there
for a second. A 10 -year -old boy. He is standing
on the red staircase of the Kremlin, and he watches
as his own family members, his uncles, his mother's
friends, are dragged out and murdered on the
pikes of these soldiers. Just impaled in front
of him. Some accounts say he saw his protector.
A man named Artemon Matveyev literally torn apart
right in front of him. That kind of trauma doesn't
just go away. It shapes your entire worldview.
It's probably where those dicks came from. It's
very likely where those facial tics and convulsions
came from later in life. He learned a lesson
that day, a brutal one. Safety is an illusion.
And power, raw, physical, undeniable force is
the only thing that actually matters. And the
result of all this bloodshed is one of the weirdest
political arrangements in history. because neither
side could fully wipe the other out, they have
to compromise. So they decide, okay, we'll have
two czars. Which is just wild. It's the dual
throne. It's a fascinating artifact. You can
actually see it in the Kremlin armory today.
It's this massive, double -seated, velvet throne.
So who sat where? On one side sat Ivan V, Peter's
half -brother from the rival Miloslavsky family.
Ivan was technically the senior czar, but he
was described as... weak -minded, he was nearly
blind, and he could barely walk. Okay, so a figurehead.
Essentially. And on the other side sat the 10
-year -old Peter. But the best part, or the creepiest
part, is the hole, right? You have to tell them
about the hole. The hole is the key detail. Cut
into the back of the throne, behind the boys
was a concealed opening masked by the velvet.
And their older sister, the Regent Sophia. The
real power broker. The real power broker at this
time. An incredibly sharp and ambitious woman.
She would sit behind them, completely hidden,
and she would listen to the ambassadors and the
nobles and then whisper instructions to the boys.
Say this. Do that. Don't agree to that. Exactly.
She was literally the power behind the throne.
But eventually. Sophia's influence pushes Peter
out. He and his mother get, well, basically banished
from the Kremlin. They're sent to an estate called
Prioburzansoke. Honestly, looking back at the
sources, this seems like the best thing that
could have possibly happened to him. How so?
Well, if Peter had stayed in the Kremlin, he
would have been suffocated by court ritual, by
religious ceremony, by the heavy brocade robes
of the boyars. He might have just turned out
to be another figurehead. Just another Ivansvi.
Exactly. But in Priobras and Skoya, he was wild.
He was free. And crucially, he was right next
to the German quarter. The German quarter. This
is where all the foreign expats lived, right?
The engineers, the merchants. Yes. It was a suburb
of Moscow called Nemetskaya Sloboda. Nemets in
Russian basically meant mute, as in someone who
couldn't speak Russian. So it just applied to
all foreigners. Dutch, English, Germans, Scots.
And Peter became obsessed with this place. Completely.
He realized that these foreigners knew things
that Russians just didn't. Practical things.
Tangible things. Like what? Well, they knew how
to build ships that could sail against the wind.
They knew mathematics. They understood fortification.
They had astrolabes and compasses. And for a
teenage Peter, the Kremlin was full of incense
and chanting, which didn't really do anything.
Right. The German quarter, on the other hand,
was full of machines and maps that worked. It
was a world of applied knowledge. And he didn't
just read about it. starts building what the
history books call his toy army. But I feel like
the word toy is really misleading here. Very
misleading. Play regiments might be a better
translation, but even that is too soft. He recruited
hundreds of boys, sons of nobles, but also stable
boys, servants, anyone he could find, and organized
them into actual regiments. With uniforms and
everything. Uniforms, real gunpowder, real muskets,
and real cannons. And didn't they do like live
fire drills? Weren't people getting hurt? Oh,
absolutely. They conducted mock battles and sieges
that were so realistic people actually got hurt
and sometimes died. A grenade would go off too
close or a cannon would misfire. That's insane.
didn't care about the safety. He cared about
the realism of the simulation. And here's the
crucial insight. Inside these regiments, birth
rank didn't matter one bit. Oh, that's interesting.
You could be a prince, but if you couldn't load
a musket properly, you were a private. If a stable
boy turned out to be a natural tactician, he
became an officer. So that's the seed of his
entire meritocracy right there in this teenage
war game. Exactly. He was building a prototype
of the Russia he wanted to create. Efficient.
militarized and based entirely on competence,
not on your bloodline. It's all about what you
can do, not who your father was. He preferred
drumming to music. He wanted to know how a cannon
worked, not how to wear a silk robe correctly.
There's this great detail in the notes that he
found an old English boat in his storage shed
somewhere, had it restored, and taught himself
to sail. He fell in love with it. He was a natural
sailor. But he also wanted to learn everything
else. He learned Dutch. He learned carpentry.
It's like he was trying to manually download
the entire skill set of Western Europe into his
own brain. And that outsider upbringing is so
vital. He didn't care for the long beards and
the heavy caftans of the Russian boyars, the
nobility. He saw all of that as symbols of backwardness,
of stagnation. If you could build a ship, he
was your friend. If you could build a ship or
fire a cannon, Peter liked you. It didn't matter
who your father was or how long your beard was.
So let's fast forward a bit. He eventually wrests
power from his sister Sophia in 1689. She gets
sent to a convent, naturally. That's what you
did with inconvenient women in rural families
back then. Of course. And then his mother dies,
his code czar Ivan dies, and by 1696, Peter is
finally the sole ruler of Russia. And he looks
around at his country and realizes, we are...
behind like centuries behind it wasn't just a
feeling it was a geopolitical reality russia
was isolated it was landlocked for all intents
and purposes its only real port was way up north
in arkhangelsk on the white sea which is frozen
solid for what six months of the year or more
You can't run a modern empire if your main trade
route is an ice sheet half the time. He wants
access to the Black Sea to the south, which means
fighting the Ottoman Empire. A huge undertaking.
Massive. He has some mixed success taking the
fortress of Azov using river ships that he built
himself, basically. But he realizes very quickly
that Russia can't do this alone. The Ottoman
Empire is a superpower. He needs allies. And
more importantly, he needs better technology.
So he decides to go on a road trip. The Grand
Embassy. This is honestly one of my favorite
parts of history because it just sounds like
a sitcom premise. It really does. The Tsar of
Russia leaves the country for 18 months to tour
Europe. But he doesn't go as the Tsar. He goes
incognito. Under the name Peter Mikhailov, his
official rank was sergeant. Which is hilarious
because, again, the guy is six foot eight. He's
traveling with a massive entourage. He's twice
the size of everyone else. He's twitching and
he's probably shouting orders. How do you think
he was fooling anyone? Well, he wasn't really.
Not for a second. Most of the monarchs and officials
knew exactly who he was. But the incognito status
was a brilliant diplomatic hack. How so? It allowed
him to bypass all the boring, time -wasting protocols.
If he visits as the Tsar, he has to sit through
endless state banquets, listen to three -hour
speeches, wear the heavy robes. As Sergeant Peter
Mikhailov, he can just sneak out the back door
and go visit a shipyard. Which is exactly what
he wanted to do. It's all he wanted to do, and
that's exactly what he did. He ends up in the
Netherlands, in places like Zondum and Amsterdam,
and he gets a job. The ruler of the Russian Empire
is working as a carpenter's apprentice on a Dutch
wharf. Living in a little log cabin. Lived in
a log cabin, bought his own tools. He insisted
on being treated like a regular worker by the
Dutch shipwrights. If they addressed him as Your
Majesty, he'd get angry. He wanted to learn the
hands -on physics of bending wood and caulking
holes. But his curiosity was boundless. It wasn't
just ships. No, it was everything. He was a true
polymath. He visited Frederick Reich, the famous
anatomist. I read about this. He was fascinated
by the dissections. He learned how to preserve
specimens in jars. He learned how to catch and
pin butterflies. He was just captivated by the
idea that the world could be categorized and
understood through science, not just through
superstition and prayer. And we have to talk
about the dentistry. Oh, yes. The dentistry.
Unfortunately for his court, he became obsessed
with the mechanics of pulling teeth. He bought
a set of dental pliers, and the sources say he
would carry around a bag of teeth that he'd pulled
from his, let's say, willing subject. So if you're
a courtier and you have a toothache. You learn
to keep your mouth shut around Peter, or he'd
come at you with the pliers. And he wasn't exactly
a trained professional. That is genuinely terrifying.
But then he moves on to England, right? He does.
He spends several months in London. He visits
the Royal Mint and is amazed by the recoinage
process. He may have even met Isaac Newton. who
was warden of the Mint. Wow. He meets King William
III. He inspects the dockyards at Deptford. But
we also have to touch on the sheer destructive
energy of Peter and his entourage. Oh, this is
the story about John Evelyn's house. Yes. They
rented a beautiful estate from John Evelyn, who
was a famous writer and gardener. And they basically
trashed the place like a rock band in a hotel
room. What did they do? It was carnage. They
used the family portraits for target practice
with their muskets. They dragged grease and ink
all over the floors. They reportedly used expensive
silk curtains for, let's just say, hygiene purposes.
And Peter's favorite pastime was to have his
friends push him in a wheelbarrow at full speed
through Evelyn's prized holly hedges. He had
people push him in a wheelbarrow through hedges?
Just for fun? Just smashing through them. It's
this bizarre, almost unbelievable mix of high
intellect and almost animalistic chaos. But beneath
all the partying and destruction, he was recruiting.
Right. This was a business trip. Absolutely.
He hired hundreds of specialists, shipwrights,
engineers, naval officers, surgeons, promising
them huge salaries to come back to Russia with
him. As you said before, he was essentially stealing
the source code of Western civilization to install
it back home. But the vacation had to end. He
gets word of another stealthy rebellion back
in Moscow. So he has to rush back in 1698. And
if the Grand Embassy was the fun, educational
part of the story, what happens next is the horror
movie part. It gets dark. It was a bloodbath.
The rebellion had actually already been crushed
by his generals before he even arrived, but Peter
wasn't satisfied with that. He felt the old Russia
trying to pull him back to undo his work. He
wanted to send a message. A message that would
echo for centuries. He initiated a massive new
investigation. Over a thousand Streltsy were
rounded up. tortured, and executed. You're not
talking about a quick -firing squad. No. This
was medieval stuff. Breaking on the wheel, beheading,
mass hangings. The bodies were left on display
for months as a warning. And Peter personally
participated in the executions. He took up an
axe himself. He took an axe and chopped off heads.
And he forced his courtiers, these soft, robed
nobles who had probably never held an axe in
their lives, to do the same. Imagine the psychological
terror of that. He was making them complicit.
He was baptizing them in blood into his new order.
And then, the very morning... after he returns,
still covered in the dust of Europe, he starts
the cultural revolution. He starts cutting off
beards. Quite literally, he gathers his nobles
and while they're all kneeling to welcome him
home, he pulls out a pair of shears and starts
hacking off their long flowing beards. You have
to understand, in Russian Orthodoxy at the time,
The beard was sacred. It was everything. It was
a sign of being made in God's image. To shave
it was considered a grave sin. It was a massive
loss of identity and piety. But Peter didn't
care one bit. He said, shave it or pay up. The
beard tax. It's one of the most famous and frankly
bizarre taxes in history. If you wanted to keep
your beard, you had to pay a tax. And it was
quite expensive for the nobility. And you got
a little token. You did. A special copper token
that you had to carry to prove you'd paid. And
it said on it, the beard is a superfluous burden.
It was a violent, symbolic break from the past.
And it wasn't just the beards. He also banned
the traditional long robes and forced everyone
at court to wear German or Hungarian style jackets.
He was forcing them to look like the foreigners
they had always been taught to despise. So he's
reshaped the look of his people. He's crushed
his enemies. Now he wants to reshape the map
itself. We talked about the Black Sea, but that
didn't work out perfectly. So his focus shifts
north. His focus shifts to the Baltic Sea. He
needs a reliable port. He needs a window to the
west. Which brings us to the Great Northern War.
This was the defining conflict of his reign.
It lasted for 21 years. It was a massive gamble.
He went to war against Sweden. Which, people
forget, was the absolute superpower of the north
at the time. Totally. They had the best, most
professional army in Europe. They were led by
King Charles XII, who was this teenage military
genius. Peter, on the other hand, thought it
would be a cakewalk. It was definitely not a
cakewalk. No. The Battle of Narva in 1700 was
an absolute catastrophe for Russia, a complete
humiliation. The Russian army was destroyed by
a much smaller Swedish force in a blinding snowstorm.
They lost all their artillery. Almost all of
it was captured by the Swedes. It was an unmitigated
disaster. But this is where Peter's personality
kicks in. Most leaders would sue for peace, maybe
quit. Peter just says, OK, we need better cannons.
Go melt down the church bells. Exactly. He didn't
wallow in defeat for a second. He stripped the
bells from the churches, which, again, horrified
the faithful and had them cast into new guns.
He used the defeat as a lesson. He radically
overhauled the army, adopting Swedish tactics,
improving training. And while the Swedes were
busy fighting in Poland. Peter creeps back to
the Baltic coast. And in 1703, on a swampy, miserable
island in the Neva River Delta, he decides to
build a city. St. Petersburg, the city famously
built on bones. It was an insane place to build
a capital city. It was a mosquito infested marsh.
It flooded constantly. There were no stones.
There was no timber nearby. Everything had to
be imported. So how did he build it? With forced
labor. He conscripted tens of thousands of peasants
and prisoners of war and forced them to work
in appalling conditions. They were digging canals
and laying foundations with their bare hands
sometimes. Thousands died of dysentery, malaria,
exhaustion. And the detail about how he got the
building materials is just wild. He forbade stone
buildings anywhere else in Russia. Is that right?
Yes. It's an incredible display of autocratic
power. He issued a decree. No new stone buildings
in Moscow or anywhere else in the entire empire.
If you were a stonemason, you were out of a job
unless you moved to St. Petersburg. He cornered
the market on stonemasons. He did. And he established
a stone tax. Every cart or ship entering the
city had to bring a certain number of stones
with them as a toll. He forced the nobility to
move there against their will and build lavish
palaces in a style they didn't understand. And
all the while, he himself lived in a tiny log
cabin. A modest three -room log cabin while demanding
they build a European metropolis around him.
It's like if the U .S. president decided to build
a new capital in the middle of the Florida Everglades
and banned concrete everywhere else in the country
just to make it happen. That is a perfect analogy.
And the nobles hated it. It was cold. It was
damp. It was expensive. But Peter loved it because
it was his paradise. It was a blank slate. Moscow
was old, traditional Russia. St. Petersburg was
the future. And eventually, the war turns in
his favor. 1709, the Battle of Poltava. The great
turning point. Charles XII of Sweden invades
Russia, a mistake that Napoleon and Hitler would
later repeat. His army is weakened by the brutal
Russian winter. And at Poltava, Peter's new modernized
army absolutely crushes the Swedes. A decisive
victory. Decisive is an understatement. Charles
XII flees to the Ottoman Empire. Russia effectively
replaces Sweden as the great power of the north.
The window to the west is now permanently secured.
So he has a city. He has his great military victory.
Now he's the emperor. In 1721, he officially
takes the title emperor of all Russia. But he's
not just conquering land. He's conquering time
and language itself. Let's talk about the reforms.
It is hard to overstate how deep these reforms
went. He literally changed time. Explain that.
Russia used to date its years from the supposed
creation of the world. So for them, it was the
year 7208. Peter decided to switch to the Julian
calendar, like Europe. He just proclaimed that
it was now the year 1700, dating from the birth
of Christ. And he moved New Year's. He moved
New Year's Day from September 1st to January
1st. He forced the entire country to sync its
watch with Europe. And the alphabet. Imagine
a leader today saying, hey, everyone, we're changing
the font of the language. It sounds absurd, but
that's what he did. He simplified the old, complex,
Cyrillic alphabet, creating what's called the
civil script. He wanted books to be more readable,
more accessible, not just ornate religious texts.
He introduced Arabic numerals to replace the
clunky letter -based numbers they used. He's
building the infrastructure for a literate scientific
society. Step by step. But the biggest social
change had to be the table of ranks. This was
revolutionary. For centuries, your status in
Russia depended entirely on your lineage. The
boyars were the old landed aristocracy. Peter
hated that stagnation. He thought it was inefficient.
So he blew it up? He blew it up. He introduced
the table of ranks in 1722. It created a hierarchy
of 14 grades for the military, the civil service,
and the court. Everybody started at the bottom.
If you served the state well, you moved up. If
you reached the eighth rank, you became a hereditary
noble, regardless of who your parents were. So
he's basically trying to create a meritocracy.
He wants a startup culture and a feudal empire.
An excellent way to put it. But at the same time,
he's dismantling the church's power. And this
is where that Antichrist label really starts
to stick for a lot of people. Right, because
the church was the other great power center in
Russia. The only other one, really. And Peter,
well, he was religious in his own way. He sang
in the choir. He knew the liturgy. But he despised
the political power of the church hierarchy.
So when the patriarch, the head of the Russian
church, died, Peter simply refused to appoint
a new one. He just let the seat sit empty. For
years. Eventually, he abolished the patriarchate
entirely and replaced it with something called
the Holy Synod, which was a council of bishops
effectively controlled by a government official
he appointed. He turned the church into just
another department of the state. And we can't
skip the all -joking, all -drunken synod of fools
and jesters. What on earth was that? It was.
Well, it was bizarre. It was essentially a club
Peter formed with his closest drinking buddies.
They gave themselves mock religious titles. Peter's
was proto -deacon. One of his friends was the
prince pope. And they held mock ceremonies. Mock
ceremonies that were really just elaborate drinking
parties. They parodied church rituals, often
involving massive amounts of alcohol and crude
jokes. Was he just blowing? off steam or was
he trying to make a point i think it was both
he was definitely mocking the stiffness and self
-importance of the church trying to drag it down
to earth but to the average russian peasant seeing
the czar mock the holy liturgy it looked demonic
it would have been deeply shocking it reinforced
the idea that this man wasn't a true pious czar
but maybe a german changeling or the devil himself
it's such a contradiction he's building churches
in st petersburg but he's mocking bishops in
moscow He's advancing science, creating the Kunstkammer,
his cabinet of curiosities with all those preserved
monsters and deformities to debunk superstition.
But he's also ruling through absolute terrifying
fear. And nowhere is that fear more palpable
or more tragic than within his own family. No,
his personal life is just as tumultuous as his
public one. Yeah, let's get into that. He didn't
have great luck with wives initially. His first
marriage to Eudoxia Lopakina was arranged by
his mother when he was very young. He hated it.
She was traditional, conservative, pious, everything
he was trying to destroy in Russia, he saw in
her. So what did he do? He eventually just forced
her into a convent, shipped her off to a nunnery
to get her out of the way. But then he meets
Catherine. And this is like a Cinderella story,
but with a lot more war and vodka. Catherine
I. She's an incredible story in her own right.
She was a peasant, born Marta Skavronskaya, in
what is now Latvia or Estonia. So not a noble
at all. Not even close. She was a servant, maybe
a laundry washer, who was captured by Russian
troops during the war. She passed through the
hands of a few officers and eventually caught
Peter's eye. And what was it about her? She was
illiterate. She was common. But she understood
him in a way no one else did. She was the only
person who could calm him down during his rages
or when he had his seizures. She would just hold
his head in her lap and speak to him softly until
he fell asleep. She was his partner. His true
partner. They married secretly at first, then
officially. He even crowned her empress. But
then there's Alexei, his son from that first
marriage. The heir to the throne. The tragedy
of Alexa is the tragedy of Peter's reign in microcosm.
Alexa was everything Peter wasn't. How so? He
was quiet, intellectual, deeply religious, and
he preferred the old ways of Moscow. He didn't
want to be a soldier. He didn't want to build
ships. And more than anything, he was terrified
of his father. And Peter just bullied him, right?
Relentlessly. Relentlessly. Peter saw his son
as a failure, as a threat to his legacy. He kept
threatening to disinherit him, to send him to
a monastery if he didn't shape up. So what did
Alexei do? Terrified for his life, he did the
unthinkable. In 1716, the heir to the Russian
throne fled the country. He ran away. He went
to Vienna to his brother -in -law, the Holy Roman
Emperor, trying to hide from his own father.
That's how scary Peter was. His own son, the
Tsarevich. fled across a continent to get away
from him. Peter was incandescent with rage. This
wasn't just a rebellious teen. This was a major
political threat. Foreign powers could use Alexei
as a figurehead, as a rallying point for all
the anti -Peter sentiment to overthrow him. So
he had to get him back. He sent his most cunning
agents to track Alexei down. And they tricked
him into coming back, promising him a full pardon.
Come home, they said. Your father forgives you.
All is forgiven. And Alexei believed them. He
came back, but there was no forgiveness. No.
As soon as Alexei was back on Russian soil, Peter
had him arrested. He stripped him of his title
as heir and set up an investigation, convinced
there was a massive plot against him. And then
the unthinkable happened. The Tsar's son was
tortured. Peter allowed his own son to be whipped
with the knout, to be interrogated under torture,
to extract a confession of treason. Did he confess?
He confessed to anything they wanted him to.
He implicated his friends, his supporters, and
eventually a court of officials sentenced him
to death. And Alexei dies in prison. He died
from the injuries he sustained during the torture
just days before he was scheduled to be formally
executed. Peter was fully prepared to execute
his own son for the sake of the state. That is,
it's just so cool. It really answers the question
of his priorities, doesn't it? It does. The state
comes first above everything, even before family.
Absolutely. To Peter, Alexei wasn't just a son.
He was a living symbol of the backward, traditional
Russia that Peter was trying to kill. He believed
that if Alexei took the throne, the navy would
rot, St. Petersburg would be abandoned, and the
beards would grow back. Peter couldn't let that
happen. Not ever. So after Alexei dies, Peter
changes the succession law. He decrees that the
reigning emperor can choose anyone he wants as
successor. It doesn't have to be the eldest son.
Which is a move that backfires spectacularly,
because in the end, he never names anyone. Right.
Let's go to the end. It's 1725. Peter's only
52 years old. But he's lived a hard life. He's
been running at 110 % capacity for decades. His
health is failing. What was wrong with him? He
had serious bladder and urinary tract issues,
probably uremia. It was a painful, slow decline.
But there's a legend about his death, isn't there?
A story that fits the hero narrative a little
better. Yes, the legend says that in November
of 1724, he saw a boat of soldiers that had overturned
in the icy Gulf of Finland. And he supposedly
waded into the freezing water himself to help
rescue them. Chest deep in the ice. So the story
goes, he got hypothermia, which worsened his
existing infections, and that's what ultimately
killed him. Is it true? Most historians are pretty
skeptical. The timeline doesn't quite match up
with the progression of his illness, and the
only source for it is a much later, somewhat
romanticized account. It's far more likely he
just died from the natural progression of his
infection. But it's a good story. It's a great
story. And the legend exists because people wanted
to believe he died as he lived, sacrificing his
own body for his subjects, for his state. And
the final scene. He's on his deathbed. He knows
the end is near. He asks for a pen and paper.
He manages to scrawl two words, leave all two,
and then he loses consciousness. The pen falls
from his hand. He dies without finishing the
sentence. Leave all two. Talk about a cliffhanger
for an entire empire. It threw Russia into decades
of palace coups and instability, what historians
call the era of palace revolutions, because nobody
knew who was supposed to be in charge. His wife,
Catherine, took over, but the line was unclear.
So let's try and wrap this all up. What is the
final verdict? We have the bronze horseman statue
in St. Petersburg depicting him as this Roman
-style hero rearing his horse over the snake
of treason. We have someone like Stalin, who
centuries later deeply admired Peter's methods.
And then we have the westernizers throughout
Russia. And on the other side, we have the critics,
the Slavophiles, the old believers who say he
fractured the Russian soul. He created this unbridgeable
gap between the westernized elite who spoke French
and German, dressed like Parisians and looked
down on their own culture, and the vast peasantry
who remained in the Middle Ages. He modernized
the state. but he strengthened serfdom to do
it. He built a great fleet, but he ruled by the
knout and the executioner's axe. It's the ultimate
ends justify the means debate. Why did Stalin
admire him so much? Stalin admired him precisely
because Peter proved that a single, ruthless,
unbending will could force a backward country
to become a superpower in a single generation.
Stalin saw the state as a machine, and people
were just cogs. If a cog didn't fit, like his
own son or the Streltsy, You didn't fix it. You
just crushed it and replaced it. It's a terrifying
precedent to set. It is. Peter proved that you
can change a culture by force. You can force
a leap of centuries. But the cost is that the
state becomes a kind of deity, an entity that
is more important than any individual life. So
here's the question I want to leave you with
today. If Peter hadn't done it, if he hadn't
dragged Russia into the West by its beard, kicking
and screaming, what would have happened? It's
the great unknown. Would Russia have been colonized
and carved up by Sweden or the Ottomans? Or would
it have found its own more organic, maybe less
bloody path to modernity on its own terms? That
is the great what if of all of Russian history.
And we will never, ever know the answer. But
if you ever find yourself in St. Petersburg,
standing by the Neva River, looking up at that
bronze horseman, just remember. You are looking
at a monument to sheer, terrifying, world -changing
will. And that's our deep dive on Peter the Great.
Thanks for joining us. Thank you.