Peter the Great

Peter I (Russian: Пётр I Алексеевич, romanized: Pyotr I Alekseyevich, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr ɐlʲɪkˈsʲejɪvʲɪtɕ]; 9 June [O.S. 30 May] 1672 – 8 February [O.S. 28 January] 1725), better known as Peter the Great, was the Tsar of all Russia from 1682 and the first Emperor of all Russia from 1721 until his death in 1725. He reigned jointly with his half-brother Ivan V until 1696. From this year, Peter was an absolute monarch, an autocrat who remained the ultimate authority and organized a well-ordered police state.

Much of Peter's reign was consumed by lengthy wars against the Ottoman and Swedish empires. His Azov campaigns were followed by the foundation of the Russian Navy; after his victory in the Great Northern War, Russia annexed a significant portion of the eastern Baltic coastline and was officially renamed from a tsardom to an empire. Peter led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernized, and based on radical Enlightenment.

In December 1699, he introduced the Julian calendar, and in 1703, he introduced the first Russian newspaper, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, and ordered the civil script, a reform of Russian orthography largely designed by himself. On the shores of the Neva River, he founded Saint Petersburg, a city famously dubbed by Francesco Algarotti as the "window to the West". In 1712, Peter relocated the capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg, a status it retained until 1918. Peter had a great interest in plants, animals and minerals, in malformed creatures or exceptions to the law of nature for his cabinet of curiosities. He encouraged research of deformities, all along trying to debunk the superstitious fear of monsters. He promoted industrialization in the Russian Empire and higher education. The Russian Academy of Sciences and the Saint Petersburg State University were founded in 1724, and invited Christian Wolff and Willem 's Gravesande.

Peter is primarily credited with the modernization of the country, quickly transforming it into a major European power. His administrative reforms, creating a Governing Senate in 1711, the Collegium in 1717 and the Table of Ranks in 1722 had a lasting impact on Russia, and many institutions of the Russian government trace their origins to his reign.