The first years of the reign of Peter I.

Azov campaigns and the “Great Embassy”.

Industry.

Trade.

Agriculture.

Financial policy.

Reorganization of the public administration system.

The Church and the liquidation of the patriarchate.

Creation of a regular army and navy.

Streltsy uprising of 1698

“The Case of Tsarevich Alexei.”

Astrakhan uprising.

Uprising under the leadership of K. Bulavin.

The main directions of foreign policy in the era of Peter I and the Northern War.

Reforms in the field of education and culture.

The first years of the reign of Peter I.

After the August coup of 1689, power in the country passed to supporters of the seventeen-year-old Tsar Peter Alekseevich (who formally ruled until 1696 together with his brother Ivan) - P.K. Naryshkin, T.N. Streshnev, B.A. Golitsyn and others. A number of important government posts were also occupied by relatives of Peter’s first wife E.F. Lopukhina (the wedding took place in January 1689). Having given them the leadership of the country, the young tsar devoted all his energy to “Neptune and Mars fun”, for which he actively attracted “foreign servicemen” who lived in the German settlement (Kukue).

Peter surrounded himself with capable, energetic assistants and specialists, especially military ones. Among the foreigners, the following stood out: the tsar's closest friend F. Lefort, the experienced general P. Gordon, the talented engineer J. Bruce, and others. And among the Russians, a close-knit group of associates gradually formed, who subsequently made a brilliant political career: A.M. Golovin, G.I. Golovkin, brothers P.M. and F.M. Apraksin, A.D. Menshikov. With their help, Peter organized maneuvers of “amusing” troops (the future two guards regiments - Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky), which were held in the village of Preobrazhensky. Peter paid special attention to the development of the Russian navigator. Already in May 1692, his first “amusing” ship, built with the participation of the Tsar himself, was launched on Lake Pereslavl. In 1693-1694 The first Russian naval ship was built in Arkhangelsk and another one was ordered in Amsterdam. It was on board a Dutch-built ship in July 1694, during a real sea voyage organized by the Tsar, that the Russian red-blue-white flag was first raised.

Behind Peter’s “military amusements” there was a far-reaching goal: the struggle for Russia’s access to the sea. Due to the short winter navigation, the Arkhangelsk port could not provide year-round trade. Therefore, the bet was made on access to the Black Sea. Thus, Peter returned to the idea of ​​the Crimean campaigns, in which Prince V.V. failed. Golitsyn. After a three-month siege of Azov (spring - summer 1695), Peter was forced to retreat. Without a fleet, it was impossible to besiege the fortress from both land and sea. The first Azov campaign ended in failure. In the winter of 1695/96. Preparations for the second campaign began. Construction of the first Russian fleet began in Voronezh. By spring, 2 ships, 23 galleys, 4 fire ships and 1,300 plows were ready, on which the 40,000-strong Russian army again besieged Azov in May 1696. After a blockade from the sea on July 19, the Turkish fortress surrendered. The fleet found a convenient harbor in Taganrog and began building a port. But still, the forces to fight Turkey and Crimea were clearly not enough. Peter ordered the construction of new ships (52 ships in 2 years) at the expense of landowners and merchants.

At the same time, it was necessary to start looking for allies in Europe. Thus was born the idea of ​​the “Great Embassy” (March 1697-August 1698). Formally, it had the goal of visiting the capitals of a number of European states to conclude an alliance against Turkey. Admiral General F.Ya. was appointed as great ambassadors. Lefort, General F.A. Golovin, head of the Ambassadorial Prikaz, and Duma clerk P.B. Voznitsyn. The embassy included 280 people, including 35 volunteers who were traveling to learn crafts and military sciences, among whom, under the name of Peter Mikhailov, was Tsar Peter himself. The main task of the embassy was to familiarize itself with the political life of Europe, study foreign crafts, life, culture, military and other orders. During his one and a half year stay abroad, Peter and his embassy visited Courland, Brandenburg, Holland, England and Austria, met with sovereign princes and monarchs, studied shipbuilding and other crafts. Came in the summer of 1698. A message from Moscow about a new uprising of the archers forced the tsar to return to Russia.

International relations in Europe at this time were not in favor of continuing the war with Turkey, and soon (January 14, 1699), Russia, like other countries members of the “Holy League,” had to agree to a truce concluded in Karlovtsy. However, the “Great Embassy” became a true academy for Peter, and he used the experience gained in carrying out reforms in both domestic and foreign policy. For a long period, it determined the task of Russia’s struggle with Sweden for possession of the Baltic coast and access to the sea. Reorientation of Russian foreign policy by the beginning of the 18th century. from the southern direction to the northern coincided in time with enormous transformations that swept the country in all spheres of life, from priority diplomatic and military efforts to the Europeanization of life. Preparations for the war with Sweden served as an impetus for deep political and socio-economic reforms, which ultimately determined the appearance of the Peter the Great era. Some reforms took years, others were rushed. But on the whole, they formed a system of an extremely centralized absolutist state, headed by “an autocratic monarch who, as Peter himself wrote, should not give an answer to anyone in his affairs in his affairs.” The transformations were formalized by legislative decrees of the tsar, and their number in the first quarter of the 18th century. amounted to more than 2.5 thousand.

Industry.

During Peter’s accession, Russian industry, strictly speaking, did not exist and there was only one major merchant in Russia: the Tsar. During the duumvirate of Peter and John, a large reward was promised to the captain of a French ship for importing white paper, wine and some other goods into the country that were difficult to obtain in any other way. At the same time, the first Russian economist Pososhkov wrote a book - his “Testament”, where he proclaimed contempt for wealth. Twenty years later, the same author wrote, on white paper made in Russia, “A Discourse on Poverty and Wealth,” in which he tries to come up with ways to increase the wealth of the state and individuals and, before Smith and Turgot, explains the benefits of piecework over daily work. Peter did his job.

This is a very significant matter. Judging by the intensity of the effort, the variety and ingenuity of the means used, the logical coherence of the guiding threads, despite some inconsistency, it deserves an honorable place in the history of the brilliant worker. To increase the well-being of individuals, while at the same time increasing state revenues, to simultaneously create new sources of taxation and new sources of production, to replace imported goods with products of domestic industry; to arouse the activity of the people and their spirit of enterprise; to force idle people, monks, nuns, and beggars to take places in the ranks of the working population; eliminate the indifference and even hostility of the administration towards the productive forces, introduce changes in unsatisfactory justice, eliminate the insufficient development of credit. lack of public safety, create a third estate, and finally introduce Russia into the modern economic movement.

The success of his enterprise was partly spoiled by an unfortunate coincidence and a fundamental mistake. Coincidentally, there was a war with its consequences and inevitable demands. She turned Peter, a staunch opponent of monopolies, into a creator of new monopolies, destroying with one hand what the other was doing. The mistake was his confidence in the ability to create a commercial and industrial life, to supply this creation with organs corresponding to its needs, to give it flesh and blood, then to control its movements, to turn it to the right and to the left, like regiments being created and commanded; by decrees and under the threat of the cane. Commercial and industrial companies made the first attempt of this kind in 1699. The Dutch were scared at first, but eventually they started laughing.

The war required money; the maintenance of standing troops gave impetus to the spirit of mercantilism in the West, and Peter is a zealous imitator of Colbert. True, Colbert also had no national covenants on his side. Already under Alexei Mikhailovich, perhaps even earlier, the right to import was paid for at Russian customs in Hungarian chervonets or Dutch thalers. Peter preserved, strengthening it, this system, which has survived to this day. He prohibited the export of precious metals, ignoring the warnings of Baudin and Childe about the dangers of such a practice. Having never read Klok, Schroeder or Decker, Pegr went further than them, forbidding his subjects to accept domestic coin as payment for their goods. According to Marperger, around 1723 Russia earned several barrels of gold annually in exchange with foreign countries. Peter also believed in the benefits of protectionism. The ruler of the country, which to this day has remained almost exclusively, in the sense of foreign trade, a producer of raw products, prohibited the export of some of these products, for example, flax, and so limited the right to export the rest that it was almost a prohibition. In anticipation of the opportunity to dress the entire army in locally produced cloth, he himself did not recognize otherwise for his dress and made it mandatory for liveries. When a Frenchman named Mamoron founded a stocking factory in Moscow, Muscovites were forbidden to buy them anywhere else. The industrialists, who were under the patronage of the tsar, hesitated to use the felt they produced for hats; a decree appeared that gave them courage: they were allowed to sell their goods only by releasing a certain number of hats of their production onto the market.

Such persistence of convictions, such an abundance of incentive and coercive measures, moral and monetary support, gradually did their job. Factories arose, some subsidized, others operated directly by the sovereign, others, finally, existing with their own funds. The Empress maintained a tulle factory and a starch factory in Yekateringof. Peter, who at first limited his activity to the production of items related to navigation: sailing cloth, saltpeter, sulfur, leather, weapons, gradually and partly against his will, also expanded its scope. We see him as a manufacturer of Kolomyanka in St. Petersburg, paper in Dudergof, cloth almost everywhere.

Unfortunately, all these institutions were far from thriving. It was in vain that the sovereign sold the Kolomyanka at a loss, giving five kopecks for an arshin of material that cost him fifteen. But, as usual, he continued to persist, even expanding the business, trying to introduce the production of luxury goods to his state. Russia produced carpets and tapestries without even having a paper spinning factory! And as always, the king did not limit himself to impulse, he struck from the shoulder. In 1718 The decree prescribed the use of lard instead of tar when processing yuft. A period of two years was given “to learn this, after which, if anyone makes yufti as before, he will be sent to hard labor and deprived of all his property.”

But, thus scattering himself in all directions, Peter finally stumbled upon grateful, directly productive, inexhaustibly rich soil, and immediately his impetuosity, ardor, and creative passion began to work miracles. He took up the mines. Already under Alexei Mikhailovich, the Dutch and the Dane mined ore and built factories in the vicinity of Moscow and cast cannons. With Peter's intervention, the matter assumed enormous proportions. Having ordered the establishment of ironworks in Verkhoture and Tobolsk by decree in 1697, the tsar had exclusively military purposes in mind: he needed cannons and rifles; but once it started, it went further and further, and the modern widespread development of the Russian mining industry owes its origin to it.

The sovereign began with the mining and processing of iron ore; , later he was seized by gold fever. He became even more interested, collecting all the instructions, exploring all the paths. True, numerous expeditions organized by him, Bekovich-Cherkassky to Persia in 1717, Likharev to Siberia in 1719, remained without results. Until 1720, the only silver mines were opened. But along the way, copper was found, again iron and, in 1722, coal. Thirty-six foundries were established in the Kazan province and thirty-nine in the Moscow province.

Private initiative - with the exception of the isolated case of Demidov - remained inactive for a long time. A decree issued in 1719 gives characteristic instructions in this regard: it declares free and publicly accessible the exploration and extraction of all kinds of metals on all lands without distinction. Owners of ore-bearing lands have only the right of primacy. So much the worse for them if they are slow to use it. “If they cannot or do not want it, then the right to build factories is given to others, with the payment to the landowner of 32 shares of the profit, so that God’s blessing does not remain underground in tuna.” Anyone who conceals ore or interferes with its mining is subject to corporal punishment and the death penalty. In 1723 the legislator took another step; he intended to finally end the system of the crown industrial monopoly. To the charter developed by the Manufactory Collegium, he added a manifesto inviting private individuals to replace the state in the operation of institutions of all kinds created by it, offering favorable conditions. And such versatile, persistent efforts did not remain fruitless; the creative movement of life grew, expanded, and domestic industry became a reality.

Trade.

The history of trade under Peter is almost entirely the history of domestic trade. Upon his accession to the throne, Peter had a strong desire to renounce his royal rights, which turned him into the largest and even the only major merchant of the state. But he had to submit to the law of war: he remained a merchant in order to earn money, and, without doing anything halfway, he increased the number of his affairs, monopolizing more than before, completely absorbing the entire domestic and foreign market. By creating new branches of trade, he only increased the list of monopolies. A wholesale buyer, a petty trader, he even sold Hungarian wine in Moscow! At one time, absorbed in the concerns of management and disappointed by the uncertainty of the income derived from trading enterprises, he decided to farm out the latter. Menshikov took Arkhangelsk fishing, blubber and seal skins. Then the hope for a near peace reduced the sovereign’s financial difficulties, and he returned to his natural, liberal aspirations. In 1717, trade in bread was declared free, and in 1719 all monopolies were destroyed. At the same time, the Trade Collegium, which had existed since 1715, began to show fruitful activity, engaging, among other things, in the commercial education of the trading class, sending dozens abroad, to Holland and Italy, of young people chosen from among the sons of large Moscow merchants, whose number was rapidly growing. increased. The sovereign's diplomacy, in turn, worked to expand international relations. The war had previously led to unfortunate compromises in this regard, for example, to the sale of emergency rights and privileges to the city of Lübeck in 1713 for thirty-odd thousand thalers, and to similar conditions with Danzig and Hamburg. Since 1717, Peter resolutely sought to put an end to these errors, and in the negotiations begun at that time with France, he no longer touched on such an issue, just as in the instructions given to the consulates established simultaneously in Toulon, Lisbon and London. Sometimes Peter still succumbed to the temptation to control rather arbitrarily the destinies of these nascent relations. Proof of this is the history of the St. Petersburg port, as well as the formal battles of the great man with foreign and Russian merchants who stubbornly preferred the Arkhangelsk port. When the king exhausted the means of peaceful persuasion; when he saw that neither the creation of the vast Gostiny Dvor, nor the special magistracy, composed mostly of foreigners, nor the efforts he spent to concentrate their favorite product, hemp, in his new capital, at cheap prices and in abundance, could attract them there , he resolutely resorted to the behests of his ancestors. He did not directly forcibly transport the Arkhangelsk residents to St. Petersburg, as Grand Duke Vasily did with the Pskovites, relocating them to Moscow; but he ordered the Arkhangelsk people to henceforth buy or sell hemp no other way than in St. Petersburg.

The measure bore fruits that were to be expected. The new capital was still a disgusting warehouse. The canal system intended to connect the Volga with the Neva via Lake Ladoga was still in the project. The eminent English engineer Perry, who was entrusted with the execution of the work, dissatisfied with the ill-treatment he had to endure, abandoned it at the very beginning. The second canal, invented by Peter to avoid dangerous navigation on Lake Ladoga, remained unfinished until 1732. The third system, based on the use of connecting rivers, served only to enrich the miller Serdyukov, who offered and took advantage of the concession granted to him too hastily to build up the banks of the Una and Shlina mills and taverns that had nothing to do with the St. Petersburg port. Therefore, hemp, leather and other goods, since since 1717 two-thirds of all products were necessarily sent to St. Petersburg, were delivered with great difficulty, burdened with enormous transportation costs, and not finding buyers here, they were piled up in heaps, devalued due to the large accumulation, and finally spoiled, especially hemp.

By good or by force, Petersburg was to become a trading port. In 1714, only sixteen foreign ships arrived there, a year later fifty, one hundred nineteen in 1722, one hundred eighty in 1724. Peter laid the foundation for a system of water communications, which his successors, including Catherine II, tried to complete and improve, and which, connecting the Volga basin with the Neva and Dvina basins, i.e. the Caspian Sea with the Baltic and White Seas, contained in the space occupied by canals three hundred and two miles, seventy-six lakes and one hundred and six rivers. Here there was an enormous expenditure of wealth, labor and even human lives; but the strength of Russia and the secret of its fate have always, for the most part, consisted in the desire and ability not to think about sacrifices in order to achieve the intended goal. Long-suffering men, tens of thousands buried in the Finnish swamps, and this time they submitted rather resignedly.

Peter did not attach the same importance to the development of land communications, and did not pay any attention to them. He didn't build roads. This is still one of Russia's weak points from an economic point of view, and the insufficient number of existing highways is solely the work of the engineers of the Institute of Railways, founded only in 1809. However, the great man treated with due care the caravan trade organized by his ancestors. He dealt with it himself, purchasing Tokaji grapes in Hungary; transporting the wine obtained from it to Moscow on hundreds of carts and sending the products of Siberia back to Hungary. While directing the greatest effort to the Baltic Sea and the west, he did not lose sight of his southeastern border and the commercial interests that required his intervention. It is possible that having reached Bukhara, he would subsequently establish trade with India. Separate caravans were already arriving in Astrakhan, bringing not only silk and paper fabrics produced in Bukhara, but also goods from India: precious stones, gold and silver items. In any case, Peter managed to take possession first of the course of the Irtysh, the possession of which protected the borders of Siberia from the Kalmyks and Kyrgyz, then of the Kolyvan Mountains, where treasures discovered later fulfilled the Greek fairy tale about gold mines guarded by gnomes. Having held out in Azov, Peter would also have continued, and perhaps would have achieved, the restoration of the ancient trade route of the Venetians and Genoese. Thrown back to the Caspian Sea, he, of course, made an attempt to move this route, directing it from Astrakhan to St. Petersburg. The great expedition of 1722, proposed, and the beginning of the foundation of a large city - a storage point - at the mouth of the Kura, where five thousand people of Tatars, Cheremis, Chuvash worked at the moment of the tsar’s death, apparently indicate the existence of such a thought. We can say that the plan was partly fantastic, even crazy, and there was absolutely no calculation of possibilities, distances, or transportation costs. But despite the disproportionate daring of the enterprise and the oblivion to which its immediate successors betrayed it, a certain result was achieved: the intended path to the markets of Persia and India forms part of the heritage, the colossal asset of which Russia continues to enjoy at the present time.

Agriculture.

Such a versatile, almost all-encompassing person could not help but be a farmer. And indeed, he was, and even passionate. In the history of Russian agriculture, the reign of Peter also constitutes an era. He was not content to teach his peasants how to plant potatoes, as Frederick later did; With a sickle in his hands, he showed peasants near Moscow how to harvest grain; near St. Petersburg, how to weave bast shoes. He considered the peasants as students, and himself as a teacher, forbade them to wear soles lined with large nails, because this would spoil the floors, and determined the width of the rough canvas they wove on their thighs. Having admired the garden of a rural priest in France, he immediately upon returning to Russia scolded his clergy: “Why don’t they start such gardens in their own country”! He was concerned with the selection of seeds for sowing, the raising of livestock, the fertilization of fields, and the use of implements and methods of improved farming; tried to grow grapes on the land of the Don Cossacks and took care of its more successful culture in the vicinity of Derbent, where he ordered to try Persian and Hungarian vines. In 1712 he established the first horse breeding farms; in 1706, the first herds of sheep were established in the present-day provinces of Kharkov, Poltava and Yekaterinoslav, where sheep are currently bred in huge numbers. Peter was also the first forester of his homeland. He was the first to defend the forests against the prevailing reckless destruction. To achieve this, however, he used methods that are hardly applicable at the present time even in Russia: along the banks of the Neva and the Gulf of Finland, at intervals of five miles, gallows were erected to edify the devastators. Even within the boundaries of present-day St. Petersburg, in the place now occupied by customs, there was a spruce forest then. Since the logging in it did not stop, Peter ordered a raid, hanged every tenth of the disobedient people caught and punished the rest with a whip. In general, on the basis of economic progress, the desire of the reformer encountered a double obstacle: a moral and a political one. Marked March 13, 1706, the decree addressed to the Senate punished with death local merchants who, following the habit they had acquired, about which their English customers strongly complained, mixed spoiled fiber or even stones into bales of hemp to increase weight. Raising the moral standard of commerce and industry nevertheless remained a task bequeathed to the future. At the end of the reign, the elements of commercial and industrial activity, created, called almost out of oblivion by the great creator, were still in a wild state. In 1722, Bestuzhev reported from Stockholm about the arrival there of several Russian merchants from Abo and Verel: “They brought a small amount of rough canvas, wooden spoons, nuts, and sell these goods along the streets in layers, cooking porridge for themselves in the open air; refuse to obey the demands of the police, get drunk, quarrel, fight and present a shameful spectacle of disgusting uncleanliness.”

Financial policy.

The political obstacle was finance. In the history of the great reign, financial policy is a dark spot. Of all the branches of Peter's creation, this branch, apparently, was most directly inspired and caused by the war, which was reflected in it. First of all, it does not have a transformative character at all; In addition, she is almost always frank and disgusting.

The funds that Peter had at his accession to the throne cannot be put in direct parallel with the funds of other European states. According to Golikov, they did not exceed 1,750,000 rubles. Based on such a meager budget, the material existence of the Russian state would have taken on - even touching only the internal side, regardless of any efforts directed beyond its borders - the appearance of an insoluble riddle, if one did not take into account the very special conditions in which it then found itself. First of all, apart from maintaining the army, the state itself had almost no obligations. It did not pay its employees: they were obliged to serve it in return for the privileges it distributed, or they received their salaries indirectly, through “feeding”. It did not support roads, which did not exist then, and so on. Here, for example, is the expenditure budget of 1710. It is very instructive in this regard.

artillery........................ 221,799 rub.

fleet................................... 444,288 rub.

garrisons........................ 977,896 rub.

Recruitment costs................................... 30,000 rub.

purchase of weapons......................... 84,104 rub.

Other expenses (including salary

for feldzeichmeisters.................................... 675,775 rub.

Before the accession of Peter in 1679, a very important beneficial measure was taken in this primitive organization, namely, the centralization of income into the Order of the Great Treasury, which was replaced in 1699 by the town hall. The great man, with his intervention, only destroyed everything that had been done. He was too pressed for time to follow a program that promised to give satisfactory results only over a long period of time. Needing big money immediately, he acted like the confused sons of rich parents. Instead of continuing to centralize and thus gradually destroy the individual in monetary terms). At the same time, high customs tariffs (up to 40% in foreign currency) reliably protected the domestic market. The growth of industrial production was accompanied by increased feudal exploitation, the widespread use of forced labor in factories: the use of serfs, purchased (possession) peasants, as well as the labor of the state (black-growing) peasantry, which was assigned to the plant as a constant source of labor. The decree of January 18, 1721, and subsequent laws (for example, of May 28, 1723) allowed private manufacturers to buy entire villages of peasants “without restrictions, so that those villages would always be inseparable from those factories.”

Peter the Great was born on May 30 (June 9), 1672 in Moscow. In the biography of Peter 1, it is important to note that he was the youngest son of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich from his second marriage to Tsarina Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina. From the age of one he was raised by nannies. And after the death of his father, at the age of four, his half-brother and new Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich became Peter’s guardian.

From the age of 5, little Peter began to be taught the alphabet. The clerk N. M. Zotov gave him lessons. However, the future king received a weak education and was not literate.

Rise to power

In 1682, after the death of Fyodor Alekseevich, 10-year-old Peter and his brother Ivan were proclaimed kings. But in fact, their elder sister, Princess Sofya Alekseevna, took over the management.
At this time, Peter and his mother were forced to move away from the yard and move to the village of Preobrazhenskoye. Here Peter 1 developed an interest in military activities; he created “amusing” regiments, which later became the basis of the Russian army. He is interested in firearms and shipbuilding. He spends a lot of time in the German settlement, becomes a fan of European life, and makes friends.

In 1689, Sophia was removed from the throne, and power passed to Peter I, and the management of the country was entrusted to his mother and uncle L.K. Naryshkin.

Rule of the Tsar

Peter continued the war with Crimea and took the fortress of Azov. Further actions of Peter I were aimed at creating a powerful fleet. Peter I's foreign policy at that time was focused on finding allies in the war with the Ottoman Empire. For this purpose, Peter went to Europe.

At this time, the activities of Peter I consisted only of creating political unions. He studies shipbuilding, structure, and culture of other countries. Returned to Russia after news of the Streltsy mutiny. As a result of the trip, he wanted to change Russia, for which several innovations were made. For example, chronology according to the Julian calendar was introduced.

To develop trade, access to the Baltic Sea was required. So the next stage of the reign of Peter I was the war with Sweden. Having made peace with Turkey, he captured the fortress of Noteburg and Nyenschanz. In May 1703, construction of St. Petersburg began. Next year, Narva and Dorpat were taken. In June 1709, Sweden was defeated in the Battle of Poltava. Soon after the death of Charles XII, peace was concluded between Russia and Sweden. New lands were annexed to Russia, and access to the Baltic Sea was gained.

Reforming Russia

In October 1721, the title of emperor was adopted in the biography of Peter the Great.

Also during his reign, Kamchatka was annexed and the shores of the Caspian Sea were conquered.

Peter I carried out military reform several times. It mainly concerned the collection of money for the maintenance of the army and navy. It was carried out, in short, by force.

Further reforms of Peter I accelerated the technical and economic development of Russia. He carried out church reform, financial reform, transformations in industry, culture, and trade. In education, he also carried out a number of reforms aimed at mass education: he opened many schools for children and the first gymnasium in Russia (1705).

Death and legacy

Before his death, Peter I was very ill, but continued to rule the state. Peter the Great died on January 28 (February 8), 1725 from inflammation of the bladder. The throne passed to his wife, Empress Catherine I.

The strong personality of Peter I, who sought to change not only the state, but also the people, played a vital role in the history of Russia.

Cities were named after the Great Emperor after his death.

Monuments to Peter I were erected not only in Russia, but also in many European countries. One of the most famous is the Bronze Horseman in St. Petersburg.

Main dates of the life and activities of Peter the Great

1682 - 1689 - The reign of Princess Sophia.

1689, September- Deposition of the ruler Sophia and her imprisonment in the Novodevichy Convent.

1695 - The first Azov campaign of Peter I.

1696 - Peter’s second Azov campaign and capture of the fortress.

1698, April - June- Streltsy uprising and defeat of the Streltsy near New Jerusalem.

1699, November- Peter concluded an alliance with the Saxon Elector Augustus II and the Danish King Frederick IV against Sweden.

1699, December 20- Decree on the introduction of a new calendar and the celebration of the New Year on January 1.

1700, October- Death of Patriarch Andrian. Appointment of Ryazan Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky as locum tenens of the patriarchal throne.

1701 - 1702 - Victories of Russian troops over the Swedes at Erestfer and Gumelstof.

1704 - Capture of Dorpat and Narva by Russian troops.

1705 - 1706 - Uprising in Astrakhan.

1707 - 1708 - Uprising on the Don led by K. Bulavin.

1708 - 1710 - Regional reform of Peter.

1710, January 29- Approval of the civil alphabet. Decree on printing books in a new font.

1710 - Capture by Russian troops of Riga, Revel, Vyborg, Kexholm, etc.

1712 - The wedding of Peter I with Ekaterina Alekseevna.

1713 - Relocation of the court and higher government institutions to St. Petersburg.

1715 - Founding of the Maritime Academy in St. Petersburg.

1716, August- Appointment of Peter as commander of the combined fleet of Russia, Holland, Denmark and England.

1716 - 1717 - Expedition of Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky to Khiva.

1716 - 1717 - Peter's second trip abroad.

1718 - Start of construction of the Ladoga bypass canal.

1718 - 1720 - Organization of boards.

1719 - Opening of the Kunstkamera - the first museum in Russia.

1721, October 22- The Senate presented Peter with the title of Emperor, Great and Father of the Fatherland.

1722 - Senate reform. Establishment of the Prosecutor General's Office.

1722 - 1724 - Conducting the first audit. Replacing the household tax with a poll tax.

1722 - 1723 - Peter's Caspian campaign. Annexation of the western and southern coasts of the Caspian Sea to Russia.

1724 - Introduction of a protective customs tariff.