Absolute Monarchy in Russia

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1 Absolute Monarchy in Russia

2 Objectives Explain how Peter the Great tried to make Russia into a modern state. Identify the steps Peter took to expand Russia’s borders. Describe how Catherine the Great strengthened Russia.

3 Absolute Monarchy in Russia
In the early 1600s, Russia was still a medieval state, untouched by the Renaissance or Reformation and largely isolated from Western Europe. The “Time of Troubles” had plunged the country into a period of disorder and foreign invasion. The reign of the first Romanov tsar in 1613 restored a measure of order.

4 Absolute Monarchy in Russia
Not until the end of the century, however, did a tsar emerge who was strong enough to regain the absolute power of earlier tsars. Peter the Great used his power to put Russia on the road to becoming a great modern power.

5 Peter the Great Modernized Russia
Peter, just 10 years old when he took the throne in 1682, did not take control of the government until 1689. Although he was not well educated, the young tsar was immensely curious.

6 Peter the Great Modernized Russia
He spent hours in the “German quarter,” The Moscow neighborhood where many Dutch, Scottish, English, and other foreign artisans and soldiers lived. There, he heard the new technology that was helping Western European monarchs forge powerful empires.

7 Journey to the West In 1697, Peter set out to learn about Western ways for himself. He spent hours walking the streets of European cities, noting the manners and homes of the people. He visited factories and art galleries, learned anatomy from a doctor and even had a dentist teach him how to pull teeth. In England, Peter was impressed by Parliament.

8 Journey to the West Peter brought to Russia a group of technical experts, teachers, and soldiers he had recruited in Europe. He then embarked on a policy of westernization, that is, the adoption of Western ideas, technology, and culture. But persuading fellow Russians to change their way of life proved difficult. To impose his will, Peter became the most autocratic of Europe's absolute monarchs, meaning that he ruled with unlimited authority.

9 Controlling the Church and the Nobles
Peter pursued several related goals. He wanted to strengthen the military, expand Russian boarders, and centralized royal power. To achieve his ends, he brought all Russian institutions under his control, including the Russia Orthodox Church. He also forced the haughty boyars, or landowning nobles, to serve the state in civilian or military positions.

10 Controlling the Church and the Nobles
Some changes had a symbolic meaning. After returning from the West, Peter stipulated that boyars shave their bears. He also forced them to replace their old-fashioned robes with Western-style clothes. To end the practice of secluding upper-class women in separate quarters, he held grand parties at which women and men were expected to dance together. Russian nobles opposed this radical mixing of the sexes in public, but they had to comply.

11 Controlling the Church and the Nobles
Peter knew that nobles would serve the state only if their own interests were protected Therefore, he passed laws ensuring that nobles retained control over their lands, including the serfs on those lands. In doing so, Peter strengthened serfdom.

12 Controlling the Church and the Nobles
Under his rule Serfdom spread in Russia, long after it had died out in Western Europe. He forced some serfs to become soldiers or to work as laborers on roads, canals, and other government projects.

13 Modernizing With Force
Using autocratic methods, Peter pushed through social and economic reform. He imported Western technology, improve education, simplified the Russian alphabet, and set up academies for the study of mathematics, science, and engineering.

14 Modernizing With Force
To pay for his sweeping reforms, Peter adopted mercantilist policies, such as encouraging exports. He improved waterways and canals, developed mining and textile manufacturing, and backed new trading companies.

15 Modernizing With Force
Peter had no mercy for any who resisted the new order. When elite palace guards revolted, he had more than 1,000 of the rebels tortured and executed. Then, as an example of his power, he left their rotting corpses outside the palace walls for months.

16 Peter Expands Russia’s Borders
From his earliest days as tsar, Peter worked to build Russia’s military power. He created the largest standing army in Europe. built a world-class navy from scratch, Set out to extend Russian borders to the west and south.

17 Seeking a Warm-Water Port
Russian seaports, located along the Arctic Ocean, were frozen over during the winter. To increase Russia’s ability to trade with the West, Peter desperately wanted a warm-water port—one that would be free of ice all year round.

18 Seeking a Warm-Water Port
The nearest warm-water coast was located along the Black Sea. To gain control of this territory, Peter had to push through the powerful Ottoman Empire. In the end, Peter was unable to defeat the Ottomans and gain his warm-water port, but the later Russian monarch Catherine the Great would achieve that goal before the century ended.

19 The Great Northern War In 1700, Peter began a long war against the kingdom of Sweden, which at the time, dominated the Baltic region. Early on, Russia suffered humiliating defeats. A Swedish force of only 8,000 men defeated a Russian army five times its size. Undaunted, Peter rebuilt his army, modeling it after European armies. Finally, in 1709, he defeated the Swedes and won territory along the Baltic Sea.

20 Building St. Petersburg
On this land won from Sweden, Peter built a magnificent new capital city, St. Petersburg. Seeking to open a “window on the West,” he located the city on the Baltic coast along the swampy shores of the Neva River. He forced tens of thousands of serfs to drain the swamps. Many thousands died, but Peter’s plan for the city succeeded.

21 Building St. Petersburg
He then invited Italian architects and artisans to design great palaces in Western style. Peter even planned the city’s parks and boulevards himself. Just as Versailles became a monument to French absolutism, St. Petersburg became a great symbol of Peter’s effort to forge a modern Russia.

22 Blazing Trails to the Pacific
Russian traders and raiders also crossed the plains and rivers of Siberia, blazing trails to the Pacific. Under Peter, Russia signed a treaty with Qing China that defined their common border in the east. The treaty recognized Russia’s right to lands north of Manchuria

23 Blazing Trails to the Pacific
In the early 1700s, Peter hired the Danish navigator Vitus Bering to explore what became known as the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska. Russian pioneers crossed into Alaska and migrated as far south as California. Few Russians moved east of the Ural Mountains at this time, but the expansion made Russia the largest country in the world. It still is today, nearly 300 years later.

24 Peter The Great’s Legacy
When Peter died in 1725, he left a mixed legacy. He had expanded Russian territory. Gained ports on the Baltic Sea. Created a mighty army. He had also ended Russia’s long period of isolation. From the 1700s on, Russia would be increasingly involved in the affairs of Western Europe. Yet many of Peter’s ambitious reforms died with him. Nobles, for example, soon ignored his policy of service to the state.

25 Catherine The Great Follows Peter’s Lead
Peter died without an heir and without naming a successor. This set off a power struggle within the Romanov family, from whom all the tsars had come since the early 1600s. Under a series of ineffective rulers, Russian nobles reasserted their independence. Then, a new monarch took the reins of power firmly in hand. She became known to history as Catherine the Great.

26 Rise to Power A German princess by birth, Catherine came to Russia at the age of 15 to wed the heir to the Russian throne. She learned Russian, embraced the Russian Orthodox faith, and won the loyalty of the people. In 1762, a group of Russian army officers loyal to her deposed and murdered her mentally unstable husband, Tsar Peter III. Whether or not Catherine was involved in the assassination is uncertain. In any case, with the support of the military, she ascended the Russian throne.

27 An Enlightened Ruler Catherine proved to be an efficient, energetic empress. She reorganized the provincial government, codified laws, and began state-sponsored education for both boys and girls. Like Peter the Great, Catherine embraced Western ideas and worked to bring Russia fully into European cultural and political life. At court, she encouraged French language and customs, wrote histories and plays, and organized performances. She was also a serious student of the French thinkers who led the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment.

28 A Ruthless Absolute Monarch
Catherine was also an absolute monarch, and often she was among the most ruthless. She granted a charter to the boyars outlining important rights, such as exemption from taxes. She also allowed them to increase their stranglehold on the peasants. When peasants rebelled against the harsh burdens of serfdom, Catherine took firm action to repress them. As a result, conditions grew worse for Russian peasants. Under Catherine, even more peasants were forced into serfdom

29 A Ruthless Absolute Monarch
Like Peter the Great, Catherine was determined to expand Russia’s borders. Waging the Russo-Turkish war against the Ottoman Empire gained her a warm-water port on the Black Sea in 1774. She also took steps to seize territory from neighboring Poland.

30 The Partitions of Poland
In the 1770s, Catherine, King Frederick II of Prussia, and Emperor Joseph II of Austria hungrily eyed Poland. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had once been a great European power. However, its rulers were unable to centralize their power or diminish the influence of the Polish nobility. The divided Polish government was ill-prepared to stand up to the increasing might of its neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria

31 The Partitions of Poland
To avoid fighting one another, the three monarchs agreed in 1772 to partition, or divide up, Poland. Catherine took part of eastern Poland, where many Russians and Ukrainians lived. Frederick and Joseph took control of Polish territory in the west. Poland was further partitioned in Then in 1795, Austria, Prussia, and Russia each took their final slices and the independent country of Poland vanished from the map. Not until 1919 would a free Polish state reappear.

32 Play a Peter the Great Trivia Game