Why Is The Tsardom Of Russia So Successful

INTRODUCTION
Before Peter’s reign, Russia was a mostly forgotten state, that was largely looked upon as a barbaric kingdom by the great European powers. Russia seemed to be a frozen wasteland that many powers did not even know was the largest land empire in the world. In this essay, I will explore the reforms of Peter the Great through historical authors and determine whether Tsar Peter I of Russia was successful in evolving of the Tsardom of Russia into a contemporary European empire. On top of this, I will be looking to see if his attempts at modernization in Russia had a lasting affect on Russian politics. In my analysis, I have gained understanding of the political climate of Russia during Peters youth, his military, education, church and
Centuries before the Petrine era, the Mongolian Empire conquered the Rus or “Russians”. This would later leave the Russian people with an identity crisis. Were they still European if they were governed by an Asian people? After having been dominated for more than a century the Russian people began to take back their former lands. After the fall of the Mongolian empire’s reign in Russia, Ivan the Terrible became Russia’s first “Tsar,” and the “Russian Tsardom” was born. Ivan and later Tsars would push east instead of west towards Europe. In addition, there were also major cultural differences between Western Europeans and Russians. Thus, Russia was neither geographically nor culturally European. They practiced a different kind of Christianity, wore different clothes and wrote in the Cyrillic alphabet. By the time of Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century, Russia had done little to keep up with the modernizing European continent; both technologically and culturally, it fell centuries behind. Its Orthodox clergy controlled education and there was no quality literature or art of which to speak, no emphasis on mathematics or science. By the 1680s, Moscow was considered the most populous city in Europe with ten million people. Most of this population, including the
Both of these major reforms were also closely linked with developments in Europe, developments we should briefly consider in order to understand what happened under Peter in Russia. Historians have labeled the first set of developments in question the military revolution of early modern Europe, which involved innovations in weapons technology and related tactics and strategy, enormous increases in the size of armies and navies . When his mother died in 1694, Peter, now an independent sovereign, looked to improve his nation's position on the seas. The Tsar sought to gain more maritime outlets, as his only outlet at the time was the White Sea at Arkhangelsk. The Baltic Sea was controlled by Sweden in the north, while the Black Sea was controlled by the Ottoman empire in the south. Peter wished to acquire control of the Black Sea; and his primary objective became the capture of the Ottoman fortress in Azov. In 1697, Peter became the first Russian Tsar to travel abroad in centuries. During this time, Peter spent four and a half months in the Dutch Republic, much of it devoted to studying shipbuilding and learning to sail. Interestingly, the history of the Russian fleet begins in the late 17th century with the “discovery of a sailing boat”, which Peter later elevated to the status of ‘grandfather’ of his