18a: Turn and Face the StrangeIvan the Terrible had spent the first eighteen years of his reign (1547-1565) building a Russian Empire up and the rest of it (1565-1584) tearing it down. As we have seen, the Time of Troubles (1598-1612) which followed the death of Ivan's son Fyodor, tested the fiber of the new nation in many ways: false Dmitrys, Polish and Swedish invasions, murdered Tsars, class war between peasants and boyars. But as it turned out, the Gathering of the Lands begun by Grand Prince Ivan I of Moscow was more than just a land grab.. Welded together by their Kievan Rus heritage and held together by the Russian Orthodox Church, the people of Holy Russia rose to the challenge of becoming the Third Rome. At first, the early Romanovs focused on things which the early Muscovite princes had done well only intermittently: easing tensions between the classes and avoiding senseless wars. But changes would eventually have to be made; the Western world was modernizing at a far faster rate than Russia was. If Russia let herself fall too far behind, the Poles and Swedes and Germans would be back, perhaps for good.
In segment 18b: Rise of the Romanovs the Zemsky Sobor elects the reluctant Mikhail Romanov, 16 year old son of the Patriarch Filaret, to serve as Tsar Mikhail I (1613-1645). The dynasty he founded ruled Russia for more than three centuries.The Patriarch Filaret did most of the thinking during Mikhail's reign, reinforcing the close connection between the Orthodox Church and the Russian State. Mikhail's son, Alexei (1645-1676) faced political challenges such as renewal of war with Sweden and Poland, internal uprisings, and the Patriarch Nikon's "reformation" of the Russian Orthodox Church. Nikon felt that Russian Orthodoxy needed to be purified if Russia were to claim Byzantium's role as successor to the Roman Empire. Even though he had Alexei's support, his reforms caused a lasting split in Russian life.
Segment 18c: Peter the Great examines the career of Russia's most remarkable leader, Peter the Great (1682-1725). With his hard charging energy he literally dragged his nation with him into eighteenth century European life. On territory he and his modernized army took from the Swedes, he built Russia's window on the Baltic Sea, the city of St. Petersburg. But visionary as he was, he obviously did not foresee the chaos which would follow his death, or he would have provided for a successor. For nearly all the rest of the 18th century, Russia would be ruled by females; the first three of these were usually content to let their advisors run the government while they had fun. The fourth of these, Catherine the Great, was fully Peter's equal.
Segment 18d: Russia as European Power provides a snapshot of Russia's early days as a European power, assessing Peter's influence on Russian life for good and for bad. For instance, many of the great and necessary cultural advances he promoted (such as the building of St. Petersburg itself) came directly out of the peasants' hides. But he did not only look westward. To the south, he tried but failed to get his hands on the rich farmlands of the modern day Ukraine. He had better luck extracting wealth from Siberia, but unfortunately this wealth benefitted the crown only, along with selected nobles.
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18b: Rise of the Romanovs
18c: Peter the Great
18d: Russia as European Power
18e: Conclusions
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