languages including Ukrainian, Belarus’an, Tatar, Siberian native languages, Polish,
and German. New European trends in art, architecture, and political thought
penetrated from Ukraine.
Peter I (1672–1725) grew up in this setting of change that enabled the“reforms”
for which he is most famous. In one generation he Europeanized his elites in
culture, adopted a form of European“absolutist”political thinking, constructed an
immense European-style army and navy, and restructured the institutions of central
government. He did this all in pursuit of Russia’s enduring political goals—
imperial expansion and mobilization of resources—and without forsaking the
ruler’s claim to autocratic power or abandoning Orthodoxy. Peter I made small
but very significant territorial gains and cemented his newfound geopolitical
prominence in central Europe by declaring himself“Emperor”and adopting the
terminology of“Rossiia,”rather than“Russia,”to connote the empire’s multi-
ethnic space and imperial power. The eighteenth century saw tremendous eco-
nomic growth and cultural change; ideas from Europe’s many Enlightenments—
German and French, cameralist and liberal, religious and secular—penetrated the
small but increasingly vibrant Europeanized landed elite. Secular forms of cultural
expression—portraiture, memoirs and odes, eventually stories and novels—became
popular. Across the century scholars worked to create a moreflexible literary
language for Russian. Printing was embraced by state, Church, and society; Peter
the Great founded the Academy of Sciences in 1724, staffed over the century by
foreign and eventually Russian ethnographers, cartographers, philologists, histor-
ians, and other scientists. Catherine II (ruled 1762–96) epitomized the eighteenth-
century Russian ruler—committed to autocracy and imperial expansion, resolute
champion of Russian power in Europe and Eurasia, cameralist regarding govern-
ance and Enlightened regarding culture. A patron of satirical journals and theater,
Catherine was herself an author of didactic plays. Her son Paul I (1796–1801) is
renowned for rejecting his mother and her programs, but he did not divert Russia’s
essential paths of imperial expansion (west, south, and east), central control, and its
enduring mixture of Europeanizing culture and Orthodoxy.
RUSSIA AND THE WORLD IN THE FIFTEENTH
THROUGH SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
In this brief bird’s-eye view of foreign policy through the seventeenth century, our
goal is not to be comprehensive, as international politics even in these centuries
before the arcane“balance of power”alliances of the eighteenth century could be
dizzyingly complex. Rather, we will look for general trends. In the Muscovite
centuries, Russia’s abiding concerns were few: to earn a spot on the Baltic, which
put it on a collision course with its rival to the west the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
and (to a lesser extent in these centuries) with the waxing power of Sweden; to
counter the raids of steppe nomads—Crimean Tatars, Great Horde, Nogais, and
others; and to win the great trade emporium on the Middle Volga, Kazan, and its
trade routes into Siberia and down the Volga.
Prologue 11