Peter the Great's Grand Embassy and Westernisation of Russia
Peter I left Russia in 1697 to work in a Dutch shipyard, which no reigning tsar had ever done. The Grand Embassy was nominally a diplomatic mission of some 250 people looking for allies against the Ottomans, and the tsar travelled in it under the name Peter Mikhailov, a transparent disguise that everyone was required to respect. He spent four months at Zaandam and Amsterdam working as a carpenter in the East India Company's yard, learned the theory in England at Deptford, visited foundries, mills, anatomy theatres, mints and observatories, met William III, sat with the Royal Society, and hired some 800 specialists to come back with him — shipwrights, gunners, engineers, surgeons and navigators. He returned in 1698 to a revolt of the streltsy, the old musketeer corps, which he suppressed with some 1,200 executions and personal participation. He then began cutting beards at a reception, literally, with the shears in his own hand, and imposed a tax on those who kept them. What followed over twenty-five years was a state rebuilt on foreign models: a navy from nothing, a conscript standing army, a table of ranks that made service rather than birth the route to nobility, the Julian calendar, the Academy of Sciences, provincial administration on Swedish lines, and a new capital built on a marsh at the cost of tens of thousands of labourers' lives. The methods were those of a serf state and the objects were those of a modern one. That contradiction is the argument about him, and it has been running in Russia for three centuries. He was also two metres tall, which made the disguise futile, and he worked at a forge, pulled teeth as a hobby and kept a collection of anatomical specimens that is still in St Petersburg. Russians have argued ever since about whether he opened a window on Europe or broke the country to fit through one.
- Year: 1697 CE
- Category: Political
