Peter I of Russia (Peter the Great)
Peter I was two metres tall, ruled Russia for forty-two years, and did most of it in person. He became joint tsar at ten in 1682 alongside a disabled half-brother, with his half-sister Sophia as regent, after a revolt of the streltsy in which he watched relatives thrown onto pikes from a palace window — an experience that produced a facial tic for the rest of his life and a permanent hatred of Moscow. He spent his adolescence in a village outside the city drilling play regiments that became the guards, and sailing a dinghy he found in a barn. The Grand Embassy of 1697 took him to Europe under a transparent alias to work in Dutch and English shipyards and hire specialists, and he came back to another streltsy revolt and executed some 1,200 of them. What followed was a state remade by decree: a navy, a conscript army, the table of ranks making service the route to nobility, the beard tax, the calendar, the Academy of Sciences, the alphabet simplified, and a capital built on a Baltic marsh at the cost of tens of thousands of conscripted labourers. The Great Northern War ran twenty-one years, was nearly lost at Narva in 1700, and was won at Poltava in 1709. He also had his own son tortured and killed for opposing him. He pulled teeth, performed surgery on his own courtiers, and died in 1725 of a bladder infection. The son's death left the succession open and he never named an heir. Six rulers followed in thirty-seven years, four of them removed by the guards regiments he had created, until Catherine II took the throne in 1762 by the same method.
- Lived: 1672 CE – 1725 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: tsar, emperor, military_leader, reformer
