Peter’s size (he was over six and a half feet tall) and his immense energy, curiosity and informality all contributed to his mythic status. Even so, and discounting Golovkin’s hyperbole, the Petrine legend has a core of truth. It was in his reign that Russia came to be universally regarded as a great power. He won famous victories, including one which most military experts count as one
Yet, far from inventing Russia, he built on foundations laid by others. He suffered crushing defeats as well as winning famous victories. He opened a window on the West, and advanced down the shores of the Caspian Sea, but was ultimately thwarted in his attempts to break through to the Black Sea and into Central Asia. And Russia’s advance to the Pacific, completed in his reign, would have happened anyway
For Russians, Peter remains the most popular of historical heroes, but in the West his image is tarnished by the massive wastefulness which was the by-product of his imperial ambitions. Quite apart from casualties in his wars and in his suppression of rebellions, tens of thousands of labourers, prisoners of war, convicts and servicemen — Russians and non-Russians — perished in the building of St Petersburg and his ambitious canal-cutting projects to link the Neva to the Volga and the Volga to the Don, the latter begun in 1701, but never finished. And Peter could be as cruel as any of his predecessors. He participated in the investigation under torture of his son and heir for treason, and was present when the young man died of his injuries. No one could say that the Emperor shirked his responsibilities.
In formal terms Peter’s reign began in 1682, when he became tsar jointly with his older but less able and less energetic half-brother Ivan. The mutiny which followed was directed against members of Peter’s mother’s family, the Naryshkins, and against Westernizing ministers and foreigners, some of whom were lynched. Though Peter and Ivan reigned, power was now in the hands of Peter’s half-sister Sofia and her ministers. Chief among these was Vasilii Golitsyn, who directed two major campaigns against the Crimea. Both failed, and the failure precipitated another regime change and yet more violence. When calm returned and Sofia had departed, the seventeen-year-old Peter was at last free to exercise his autocratic powers. Yet he preferred instead to prolong his adolescence.
His childhood games came to be played on an ever larger scale, and more realistically. They involved bigger and bigger boats — even the building of seagoing ships — and real soldiers rather than toy ones, with live ammunition and real casualties. So when the twenty-two-year-old Peter eventually went to war in 1694, marching as a bombardier with his own artillery train, he was no stranger to military pursuits.
Peter’s target in the campaigns of 1695 and 1696 was Azov, the formidable Turkish citadel which blocked Russia off from the Black Sea and the western flank of the Caucasus. The attempt of 1695 was not successful, but Peter was as yet a strong, young Sisyphus and he cheerfully resolved to try again next year, encouraged by his now being a member of an anti-Turkish coalition that included the Habsburg Emperor, who promised to help with engineering and explosives expertise, the King of Poland and the Doge of Venice, one of whose subjects, an expert in building and handling galleys, Peter was soon to commission as vice-admiral in his service. Intelligent as well as persistent, Peter already understood that battles and storms were the lesser part of war: that thorough preparation, careful planning and good logistics were the bases of success. And so we find him inspecting the arms-manufacturing base at Tula at the conclusion of the campaign, and early the following year he was at Voronezh, upriver from Azov, building a fleet of galleys and barges which was to neutralize the Turkish fleet. He also planned to build frigates in the yards there to exploit victory when it came.
