Peter The Great Influence On Russia

“I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself”(quotezine). Peter the Great built the foundation Russia stands on today, and enabled Russia to become the world power that we know today. Some may credit Peter with inciting westernization in Russia, but westernization started prior to when he was born. After delivering thirteen children to Tsar Alexis I, Maria Miloslavskaya died trying to give birth to her fourteenth child. Out of five sons two survived ( Fedor III and Ivan V), and out of eight daughters only six survived(Massie 34). Within a year after Miloslavskaya death, he found her successor Natalya Naryshkina, a ward of Artemon Matveev. With her semi-Western upbringing, the Tsaritsa was an instrument of change. She brought music into the palace ( something that was once banned), sponsored a royal theater. With her help “Alexi’s painful religious quality gave way to a fun, spirited, eagerness to accept Western ideas entertainments, and techniques”(Massie 44). Peter the Great forcefully pushed Russia to become more western through his class system, policies, and military, but he did so at the expense of his people. With the death of his father
He enacted reforms, changed the class system, and modernized his military,but he did so at a cost. Peter’s mission for westernization was more for himself than his people. Because of his needs and costly reforms the peasantry struggled. “ Peasants made up 97 percent of Russia’s population… they became tied down in a system bordering on slavery”( Sherman 406). They were forced to pay these taxes enacted by Peter with money they did not have. They were forced to be slaves for nobility, a concept that sets Russia back into the Medieval ages. Even though Peter the Great helped Russia into the modern world, at the cost of the peasants. Causing historians to question if Peter’s ends justified the