18e: Conclusions

1. All the King's Men
Peter did not start the process of westernizing Russia, but he certainly made it his greatest goal. Building the city of Saint Petersburg and making it Russia's capital signaled that Russia was not only a world power, but a Western world power at that. By destroying the streltsy, he left the succession open to whichever Romanov could best win the Imperial Guard's support. Among other things, this Praetorian Guard-like body effectively gave Russia 70 years of rule by females. Peter's immediate successors Catherine I, Anna, and Elizabeth depended on Westerners or Westernized Russians for guidance. Catherine the Great, who had literally made herself into a Russian , would reverse this process by turning exclusively to Russian advisers, but by this time the court language was not Russian, but French. While no Russian could deny the positive effects of Peter's decision to westernize Russia - in education, technology, and military technology for instance - eventually it became believed that Russia had lost an important part of her Slavic soul.

2. Class Relations
Even though the armed peasantry had played a large part in saving Russia from the Time of Troubles, they had nothing to show for it. Tsar Alexei's Ulozhenie of 1648 formally bound the peasants to the land (and the land's owners) for good. Stenka Razin's revolt of 1670 was the first, but not the last, of peasant uprisings which extended for the rest of the Romanov dynasty's rule. While the nobility contributed little if anything to Russia's economy, they were now forced either to serve in the military or in the civilian administration; as a rule, the brightest and best among them preferred the cavalry to the peasantry. Even so, this disaffected batch of nobles was the only force for order and justice in rural Russia. Autocratic as Peter remained, it was harder to preserve autocracy and centralization as the Russian Empire grew ever larger.

3. Decline of the Church's influence
The Orthodox Church's influence was at its high point during the reign of Mikhail whose father, the Patriarch Filaret, effectively called the shots. But the church's solidarity was shattered by Nikon's reforms and the rise of the "Old Believers."  Never again would a Patriarch wield such power. One Eastern tradition Peter the Great was happy to keep: subjugation of Church to State. By refusing to appoint a new Patriarch and ultimately handing the Orthodox Church over to a Holy Synod which he himself appointed, Peter kept the Orthodox Church from charting its own path. It would not be permitted to grow intellectually alongside the modernized Russia Peter worked to create.

4. Go East, Young Empire
Peter's  crushing victory over the Swedes at Poltava in 1709 made Russia a world power. But his next move, seizing the rich steppe land to the south from the Ottomans, failed utterly. So Peter looked east. Ivan the Terrible had begun the exploration of Siberia a century earlier, and while Siberia added no farmland to the Russian Empire, it brought in enormous wealth with its furs. The 1689 treaty of Nerchinsk had granted Russia trading rights with China, but also closed Russia off from the sea of Okhotsk, forcing Peter to search for another outlet to the Pacific.  Just before his death in 1725, Peter dispatched the explorer Vitus Bering to look for this outlet. Sixteen years later, after several attempts, Bering and his lieutenant Chirikov discovered a route to North America - the modern day state of Alaska. The Siberian fur trade and trade with China brought great wealth to the Tsarist government and the nobility, but conferred little benefit upon the hungry and land-starved peasantry.