Peter the Great: His Life and World

Robert K. Massie's biography follows Peter the Great from a childhood scarred by the streltsy revolt of 1682, when soldiers loyal to his half sister Sophia murdered relatives in front of him, through the seven years Sophia ruled as regent while Peter and his mother lived in effective exile outside Moscow, and into the moment in 1689 when Peter, still a teenager, moved against her and took the throne for himself. The book gives extended attention to the Grand Embassy of 1697 and 1698, when Peter traveled incognito, though his own extraordinary height made the disguise useless, through the Netherlands and England to study shipbuilding firsthand, working for months at a Dutch shipyard and touring English naval facilities before returning home determined to remake Russia by force of will.

Massie follows Peter through the sweeping reforms that followed, the new calendar, the beard tax on nobles who refused Western dress, the founding of a navy and a new capital, Saint Petersburg, built on captured swampland and later celebrated as Russia's window on the West, and through the long Great Northern War against Sweden that culminated in the decisive Russian victory at Poltava in 1709. The book does not soften Peter's cruelty, tracing the executions that followed the second streltsy uprising and the unhappy marriages, first to Eudoxia Lopukhina, whom he forced into a convent, then to the woman who would succeed him as Catherine the First.

Massie writes with a journalist's narrative pace built from years of research into Russian and European sources, and reading the book means following an enormous cast of courtiers, generals and rival monarchs across four decades of war and reinvention. It suits a reader who wants Russia's transformation from a medieval backwater into a European power told through the outsized, often brutal personality of the man who forced it to happen.