Peter the Great

Robert K. Massie’s *Peter the Great: His Life and World* is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that pairs the life of Russia’s most transformative tsar with a panoramic portrait of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe. Massie opens with Peter’s childhood in the Kremlin, where the young tsar witnessed the savage Streltsy uprising of 1682, an event that shaped his suspicion of the old Moscow nobility and his fascination with military and naval power. The book follows Peter’s grand tour of Western Europe, his incognito work in Dutch shipyards, and his ambitious effort to drag a landlocked, tradition-bound realm into modernity. Massie’s distinctive method is to braid three strands: the personal, the political, and the geopolitical. He gives sustained attention to the Great Northern War against Sweden and Charles XII, the founding of St. Petersburg on marshland at the mouth of the Neva, and the reforms that reshaped the army, the Orthodox Church, and the boyar class. The narrative also tracks Peter’s restless experimental spirit, from his early “play regiments” to the creation of a Russian navy and the Table of Ranks, which tied status to service rather than birth. Massie balances admiration with clear-eyed treatment of Peter’s brutality, including the suppression of the Streltsy and the persecution of his own son, Tsarevich Alexis. The result is less a psychological novel than an immersive history of a ruler and the world he forcibly remade, anchored in diplomacy, battles, and the cost of reform.