Reinventing Russia Empire of the Tsars: Romanov Russia with Lucy Worsley

I'm making my first trip to Russia,

a country I've been wanting to visit for years.

Because if you're fascinated by stories of royalty and royal power,

there's nowhere better than this.

CHURCH BELL TOLLS

This is Red Square. It's a vast and diverse place.

This is the huge, scary-looking fortress of the Kremlin.

This is an absolutely ginormous department store.

And over there is the Cathedral of St Basil.

Red Square is the centre of a country that goes all the way to China.

Now, how do you rule over a place that enormous and that confusing?

Well, in Russia, for more than 300 years,

one family managed to do just that. The Romanov dynasty.

That's as if, in Britain, the Stuarts had hung onto power

right into the 20th century.

Now, I'll be following in the footsteps of the Romanovs,

the most powerful monarchs in modern European history.

It's a roll call of extraordinary characters.

Peter the Great. The visionary who built a navy from nothing...

Ready for attack!

..and transformed a country into an empire.

Catherine the Great, empress of the glittering palaces.

The minor princess from Germany

who became the mightiest woman in the world.

Alexander I, who led his country through its darkest hour.

SOLDIERS ROAR

He defeated Napoleon.

And took the triumphant Russian army all the way to Paris.

But behind the spectacular facades lie stories of intrigue,

betrayal, scandal, even murder.

And, for all their efforts to place themselves

at the forefront of modern Europe,

the Romanovs failed to change a system that kept

millions of their subjects in medieval servitude...

until it was far too late.

When their end came, it was astonishingly brutal.

GUNSHOT

Slaughtered by the revolution that shook the world.

To understand the end of the Romanovs,

you need to understand their whole story -

of a royal family with unparalleled control over their people.

And you might ask yourself what you would have done in their shoes

with such absolute personal power.

For anyone who grew up during the Cold War,

it's hard to shake off the image of Russia

as intimidating and impregnable.

A bona fide superpower under the iron rule of the Kremlin.

Images of military might on display in Red Square

have been seared into our minds.

Yet the age of the Romanovs began in a power vacuum.

And in this programme, we'll see how, in little more than a century,

this dynasty turned around Russia's fortunes.

Back in 1613, Russia was leaderless.

There had been years of anarchy since the previous royal dynasty,

the Ruriks, had collapsed.

The country was so weakened that the Polish army had marched right in

and occupied the Kremlin.

Once the Poles had finally been driven out,

the great and good of Russia realised that they needed to stop squabbling,

and unite around a leader.

What they wanted the Romans had called a Caesar,

the Germans, a Kaiser, and, in Russian, a tsar.

They argued for weeks about who it should be.

But finally they made their choice.

The only problem was that nobody had asked this prospective tsar

if he actually wanted the job.

The high-powered delegation set out from Moscow

to find their hoped-for leader, and bring him the good news.

Their number included nobles and leading churchmen,

the power brokers of Russia, or Muscovy, as it was also known.

Their journey took them more than 200 miles north,

across countryside that was still dangerous and largely lawless.

And this was their destination - the Ipatiev Monastery,

overlooking the mighty River Volga.

SHIP'S HORN

It was still winter and, with no bridge back then,

the delegation had to cross the ice to get to the monastery.

Sheltering here was the object of the delegation's quest.

A 16-year-old boy called Mikhail Romanov.

But although the Romanovs were a well-known noble family,

power was the last thing that he wanted.

It's said that when Mikhail Romanov was offered the crown,

he burst into tears. He didn't feel equal to accepting it.

And his mother was furious with the delegation. She said, "Niet."

"No, you shouldn't have offered my son such a dangerous responsibility."

But the delegation said, "It's not up to us, it's not up to you.

"It's God who wants you to do this thing."

After several hours of deliberation,

Mikhail and his mother caved in. They accepted.

Of course, regardless of what God wanted,

other considerations had played a role in Mikhail's selection.

Mikhail Romanov came from a well-established noble family.

The family had long dynastic connections

with the previous dynasty. His father, Filaret,

was the nephew of the last wife of Ivan the Terrible.

During the election of Mikhail, Filaret was in Polish captivity.

So different groups in Russian society were satisfied with

Mikhail's position, with his social status.

And at the same time they thought it would be easy to manipulate him,

because his father, who was a very influential figure, was not around.

Under heavy protection,

Mikhail now travelled to his coronation in Moscow.

Here, in a lavish ceremony before the massed ranks

of Russia's nobility and churchmen,

he was given the all-important divine seal of approval

at the Kremlin's Cathedral of the Assumption.

This is the Russian equivalent of Westminster Abbey.

All the tsars and emperors came here for their coronations.

Mikhail Romanov was just short of 17

when he was presented with the crown, the orb and the sceptre,

presumably to a great big sigh of relief from the Russian people.

PRIEST LEADS CHURCH CHOIR SINGING

The coronation conferred absolute power on the Tsar.

Although the different noble families and the church were keen

to influence Mikhail, they agreed that a strong leader was essential

to prevent the kind of chaos from which Russia had just emerged.

And they were proved right.

More than half a century of relative stability

and reconstruction followed

under Mikhail, and then his successor, his son, Alexis.

The idea that the tsars ruled as part of a divinely ordered system

helped justify their immense power.

I've come to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow to see an icon

from the reign of Alexis which features the Tsar himself.

Painted by an influential Russian artist, Simon Ushakov,

it's called The Tree Of The Muscovite State.

Philip, this picture reminds me of Jack And The Beanstalk,

because it's got an enormous tree growing right out of the cathedral,

that's planted in the middle of the fortress of the Kremlin.

Yes, and the roots are common.

You see, there's a common root for both church power and state power.

They grow together, they act together.

A very central idea for medieval Russia.

And here we've got the first Archbishop of Moscow.

The first Archbishop of Moscow. And the first Prince of Moscow.

Planting the tree together.

-I'm more interested in...

-Yes, here's the monarch, Alexis,

or Alexei in Russian.

-The Tsarina, his wife.

-And the two little children, look at them.

Yes, two children.

Where did power really lie at this point in the 17th century?

Symbolically, it was hand-in-hand with civil power.

But in reality, of course the civil power was much stronger,

which is not depicted here.

Secretly, he is the most important person in the picture.

He is the most important.

Of course, political power belonged to the Tsar.

'But something else about the painting is very telling.

'For all its beauty,

'by Western European standards, it looks pre-Renaissance.

'Even by the late 17th century,

'foreign visitors considered Russia to be almost medieval,

'and not just in its art and its religious piety.'

Beyond the walls of Moscow lay a vast, sparsely populated,

backward country.

Russian territory stretched from the southern Steppes to the Arctic.

And thousands of miles east into Siberia.

In the late 17th century,

Russia was 100 times the area of England and Wales.

But it had less than twice the population.

And this overwhelmingly rural country was hugely underdeveloped.

Apart from churches and fortifications,

stone buildings were virtually unknown in Russia.

Peasant huts and clothes barely changed for hundreds of years.

At the Museum of Wooden Architecture in Kostroma,

they've preserved some examples.

I'm modelling a traditional dress called a sarafan.

While village life looks idyllic on a sunny day,

for most of the year it was quite the opposite.

Russia's climate was notoriously harsh.

Imagine trudging along here through the mud in the wet,

or the snow in winter.

But despite the inhospitable terrain,

the majority of Russians, right into the 19th century,

had to scratch out a living from the land.

They also had to cope with the social reality of serfdom.

This was a practice that was dying out in Western Europe.

But in 17th-century Russia, it was actually on the rise.

And if you were somebody's serf,

you were effectively their property, to be bought or sold.

Agriculture was the mainstay of Russia's economy.

And serfdom guaranteed the landowning nobility a captive workforce.

The peasants couldn't just up and leave,

in search of better pay or conditions elsewhere.

Serfdom lasted and increased in the 17th century simply because

it was found in the interests of both nobles and state to do so.

The nobles had already established

that they needed to have control over the movement of the serfs.

And to some extent it was in the interest of the state as well,

to keep people in one place, to tax them, to control them,

and to reward the nobility for their service.

So serfs were wealth, in a way that they weren't in the West.

Bodies were wealth.

But towards the end of the 17th century

it looked like things might change.

Russia gained a new tsar.

Driven by an obsessive desire to modernise the country,

he was convinced that Russia's future depended on it looking westwards,

to Europe.

Hey-hey-hey! Meet Peter the Great,

or at least the next best thing,

because this is a super-accurate wax effigy,

made just after his death

and using his actual death mask for the face.

These are Peter's real clothes and that's even his real hair.

You might be thinking, "It must be larger than life,"

because his arms are so freakishly long,

but, no, he was six and a half feet tall.

ORTHODOX CHORAL SINGING

I think he looks pretty terrifying

and in real life he was absolutely terrifying.

But Peter the Great was Russia's most far-sighted

and hard-working sovereign.

Peter's ruthlessness was a result of his traumatic childhood.

In 1682, his accession to the throne at the age of nine

was followed by a brief but bloody revolt.

A faction at court regarded Peter's half-brother Ivan

as the rightful tsar.

When rumours spread that Ivan had been killed,

a mob stormed into the Kremlin

and they were led by the royal guards themselves.

To calm the situation,

Peter's mother walked out onto the palace balcony

at the top of this staircase.

She was holding hands with both Peter and Ivan,

to prove to the mob that they were very much still alive.

It must have been a terrifying moment for the little boys,

for Peter and his brother.

But when the rebels saw that they were still alive,

everything calmed down.

It seemed to work.

But then, a second wave of violence came sweeping through the palace.

The rebels came rushing up this staircase,

and when they got to the top

they seized the family's closest advisors and leading noblemen

and they threw them down over that balustrade so they fell

and were impaled upon the spears of the guards below.

Eventually, the rebels agreed a compromise,

but not before they'd slaughtered two of Peter's uncles.

Peter would have to wait for his revenge.

The revolt left Peter with a loathing of Moscow.

As soon as he could get away,

he did.

This is Lake Pleshcheyevo, 90 miles north of the capital.

And it's on these waters that the teenage Peter felt truly at home.

So where did Peter the Great get his very un-Russian passion for sailing?

Well, he discovered an old boat

lying around on one of the royal estates near Moscow.

But in order to learn how to use it,

he had to come up here to the nice big lake,

where he could get up some speed.

And it was on the waters of this lake that a new vision

of the future of Russia began to take shape in Peter's mind.

Peter took every opportunity to come up to the lake.

He employed foreign experts to teach him

not just how to sail the boats, but how to build them.

This is the only survivor of Peter the Great's flotilla of little boats

that he had made here on the shores of Lake Pleshcheyevo.

He and his friends would go out onto the water

and amuse themselves with mock sea battles.

The small ships became known as Peter's "toy navy",

but his ambition went much further than simply messing about with boats.

Peter realised that if Russia was to have prosperity, security

and influence in the wider world, then it needed to be powerful at sea.

There's a saying that a ruler with an army has one hand,

but a ruler with a navy has two.

Whether or not this saying really was coined by Peter the Great,

there's no question that he believed it.

European powers like the English and the Dutch

were making fortunes from maritime trade.

But, despite its size, Russia was effectively landlocked.

It had just the one proper seaport, in the far north,

and that was frozen up for half the year.

More urgently, Russia's two most threatening neighbours,

Sweden to the west and Turkey to the south, both had formidable navies.

Russia needed a fleet of its own.

It needed maritime expertise.

It needed a major new seaport

that could be its gateway to the world.

Peter the Great made it his mission to get these things for Russia.

And to fulfil that mission he took an extraordinary step.

In 1697,

at the age of 24, Peter left his kingdom in the hands of his advisors

and set off to spend a gap year in Europe.

Here he was to study shipbuilding

and the latest developments in maritime science.

The journey became known as Peter's Grand Embassy.

He spent several months in Holland, working in a shipyard.

HAMMERING AND SAWING

Then, early in 1698, Peter and his entourage pitched up in London.

And one of the first places he visited

was the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

Here at the Observatory, Peter the Great was shown around

by John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal.

Together, they looked through a telescope at the planet of Venus.

But this wasn't just sightseeing.

Peter wanted to check out Britain's first purpose-built

scientific research facility.

It's hard to think of a building that could have appealed to Peter more.

It had the express purpose of using astronomy

to improve navigation at sea.

Over the coming months,

Peter gorged himself on the best of English science and technology.

He visited the Royal Society, the Royal Mint and the Tower of London,

Oxford University and the cannon foundry at the Woolwich Arsenal.

During his time in London,

Peter the Great stayed just around the bend in the river from Greenwich,

at Deptford.

He liked it there, cos it was near the shipyards

and he was spotted joining in the work.

It was said that, "The Tsar of Muscovy works with his own hands

"as hard as any man in the yard."

But Peter wasn't your regular shipbuilder.

He was the special guest of King William III,

who now gave him a special gift.

It was the ultimate boy's toy,

a modern, high-speed ship called the Royal Transport.

One of several English royal yachts, the ship was a fairly naked bribe.

William saw Russia as a lucrative potential trading partner.

Peter soon befriended the ship's designer, the Marquess of Carmarthen.

And this marquess also shared another much-loved hobby of the young Tsar's.

This man who designed the ship,

he and Peter became drinking buddies, didn't they?

I think they really found sort of kindred spirits in each other.

The became very close and spent a lot of time together

during Peter's visit and, yes, drinking was a big part of that.

Well, I think we know what their favourite tipple was.

-Brandy laced with peppers.

-That's an interesting idea.

-Indeed.

Let's see what that tastes like.

Probably fair to say that

the English couldn't teach the Russians much about drinking.

-LUCY LAUGHS

-But at the same time,

Carmarthen did actually introduce Peter to this drink.

-So this is the special drink of the shipbuilders of Deptford?

-Indeed.

-And Peter the Great got a taste for it?

-Yes.

-OK.

Pepper-flavoured brandy.

Ugh, that's foul.

That's really not very nice at all.

-Oh, you... You swallowed that!

-Oh, actually...!

THEY LAUGH

That's not as bad as I was expecting.

When Peter and his friends were in London,

they were staying in Deptford on the river,

they got up to some other naughty tricks, didn't they?

They certainly did, and they were described

by one of the Sayes Court servants where they were staying

as being right nasty in their behaviour.

They basically trashed the place completely.

They used portraits and paintings as target practice,

they burned all the chairs as firewood,

they destroyed the furniture, tore up the beds,

knocked a hole in the wall

so Peter could get out to the river easily,

and they used to race wheelbarrows

with people inside them through the hedges.

Is that because they hadn't seen wheelbarrows before?

That's exactly right, yes.

These were entirely new to them, so this was seen as a great sport.

Peter is beginning to sound like he's a complete mass of contradictions.

-Is that fair?

-I think it is.

We see on the one hand his scientific interests,

and alongside that

he's behaving like a complete lunatic.

During his year in Europe, Peter not only acquired a royal yacht,

he also purchased several shiploads of the latest maritime equipment.

And who knows - maybe a few wheelbarrows

to remind him of good times in Deptford.

He hired European shipbuilders

and sailors to bring their expertise to Russia

and to teach the skills that

he and his retinue had learned for themselves in Holland and England.

Peter also got a feel for life in prosperous, modern European cities.

He saw how their citizens behaved,

where they lived, how they dressed.

The contrast with his superstitious, conservative homeland

couldn't have been more marked.

And, as if to underline the point, in August 1698

he was forced to hurry back to Moscow.

The palace guards had rebelled again.

The revolt was quickly crushed

and this time there were no deals or compromises -

Peter was merciless in his retribution.

He had more than a thousand of his guards beheaded or hanged.

Hundreds more were tortured, flogged and banished.

The fate of the guards, known in Russian as the Streltsy,

is depicted in this picture by Vasily Surikov,

one of the great Russian history painters of the 19th century.

This is Red Square on the morning of the execution of the Streltsy.

You know which ones they are, because they have immensely long beards

and they're in their shirts,

because their uniforms have been stripped off them.

And each of them is holding a little candle.

That's his life that's about to be snuffed out.

All the rest of the people here,

and there's a huge mass of humanity, are their families.

He's got his wife weeping on his lap

and that must be his little boy who's crying on his knee.

There's a huge amount of suffering going on.

You'd think that somebody would take pity, but no.

Here's the man in charge, Peter the Great,

and he is implacable, look at him.

He's saying this lot are absolutely going

to that gallows in the background.

And the reason that Peter is so determined

is that he was once the weeping little boy himself.

These are the men who murdered Peter's own uncles.

But the real message of the picture

is that the Streltsy represent the old Russia.

They're messy and dirty and superstitious

and Peter the Great is the wind of change.

He's going to sweep them all away.

Peter's next move was to quash any lingering opposition to his rule.

He was convinced that the rebellion had been orchestrated

by his half-sister Sophia.

He didn't execute Sophia,

but he did what was considered the next best thing.

He forced her to become a nun...

..and spend the rest of her life largely in solitary confinement,

here at the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow.

But, initially at least, Peter did provide Sophia with some company.

He strung up the corpses of the Streltsy rebels

right outside her windows.

Peter now turned to the Moscow elite.

These were the same class of people

who put the Romanovs on the throne nearly 90 years before.

But Peter considered them to be reactionary and lazy.

It was time they caught up with the present day.

Peter decided that the best way to make them behave

like modern Europeans was to make them look like modern Europeans.

This is rather good, isn't it?

A bit tsar-ish, a bit furry, a bit velvety too.

Very nice.

To see just how revolutionary this was,

I've come to the famous Mosfilm Studios in Moscow.

Many a historical epic has been filmed here.

And, while I admire the vast costume department,

our translator, Misha, has volunteered

to model some traditional Russian clothes,

to show what Peter's new rules on dress actually meant.

Misha, you've been quite a long time in there - are you ready?

-I think I am.

-Let's have a look, then.

Oh, look at you! Come out.

SHE CHUCKLES

-You look like a lovely little tsar.

-Well, I am.

You're dressed for the 17th century,

-you're warm for the Moscow winters, I guess.

-Absolutely.

And, um, is it practical? Can you move about in this one?

Of course it's practical, because this is how people were dressed.

-Yes.

-It also is a little bit not really European.

-Let's see your boots.

-Maybe somewhat Oriental.

-Sexy.

-Oh, are they?

-Very nice, yes.

-Thank you.

Yes, you do have a touch of the Orient about you, looking at you.

Oh, I would say it's old Russian style...

-Old Russian style, yes.

-..rather than Oriental.

It could have some influence of the Orient,

just like a lot of old Russian architecture, for example, does.

-Yeah.

-So the clothing also may reflect that.

-Yes, yes.

So along comes Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century

and he doesn't want to see his subjects dressed like this any more,

-he wants to see them as Europeans.

-Absolutely.

And the first thing to go, I'm sorry to say, is...

-Don't!

-..the beard!

-Now, don't,

because the beard for every old Russian...

-Very important?

-..is a sacred thing.

-Right, yeah.

It's a very religious thing.

-Yes.

-And the people in those days

said that a man without a beard is naked.

But Peter the Great, he'd been to Europe,

he'd seen all of these clean-shaven people

and he thought it was very important that his subjects should lose

the beards, so there's stories of him ripping them out by the roots.

-Is this possible?

-Well, you can try, of course, but he wouldn't...

That's going to hurt you.

He wouldn't rip them off, but he cut them with an axe,

that's what the legend says.

Now, I actually know the secret of getting your beard off you.

Are you ready for this, Misha?

-I don't know.

-Come on, take it like a man!

-I am afraid!

Whee!

Argh!

HE GROANS You're laughing?

I am laughing, I've still got my moustache, it's not that bad yet.

-No, you haven't!

-Oh, no!

Now, we've Europeanised your facial hair.

Peter the Great would also have wanted to change your clothes, wouldn't he?

Yeah, he didn't stop with the beards just - he went the full way.

Go on, back into your cubicle.

Ta-dum!

Very good, fantastic!

Oh, fantastic!

So here you are, all European-ed up.

Now, it strikes me that your shoes are better for dancing,

but not so good for walking across a snowy plain.

Absolutely right. For snow, this is horrible.

I would freeze my feet off.

And how are you feeling about it as a Russian nobleman?

I, for one, am extremely unhappy,

-because I was used to my warm, good Russian clothes...

-Yes.

-..where I can wander around.

-In the snow.

In the snow, without doing a single thing,

just direct my hundreds of thousands of serfs

-and do nothing.

-Are you feeling a bit draughty in the chin department?

Absolutely naked, Lucy.

And what can you do about this as an early-18th-century nobleman?

Well, the thing is that the noblemen had really no choice.

The clergy and the people in the fields, the peasants,

as they were called at the time, they continued having beards.

They could actually pay for their beards

and there is a little token here

and it shows that I have paid... or whoever...paid a beard tax.

Once you wear it around your neck to show that you have paid for it,

you can have your proud Russian beard.

A tiny little beard on it, look at that.

I think that there's something that I owe you,

as you're clearly a beard taxpayer.

-You can have your beard back.

-Oh, thank you!

-Thank you so much.

-Enjoy your facial hair.

Do svidaniya.

And all this applied to the ladies too.

Although they're said to have enjoyed

wearing their elegant European dresses rather more than the men did.

Peter's assault on the traditions of old Moscow left the capital reeling.

But the Tsar was already planning what was to be his boldest move yet.

In 1703, Peter packed up and left Moscow once again.

-ANNOUNCER:

-'Dear passengers, please prepare your tickets to be checked

'and listen to the information announcements.'

Peter was leading a military expedition west,

towards the Gulf of Finland, the gateway to the Baltic Sea.

On the high-speed train, it takes me less than four hours.

On horseback, though, it took Peter weeks.

He was venturing into barely chartered territory,

swamplands with just a few isolated fishing settlements.

Most dangerously of all, this was land claimed by Sweden,

the most powerful country in the Baltic region.

It was when Peter reached the banks of the Neva River

that the objective of the exercise became clear.

Peter had found his gateway to the sea,

the ground zero of a new maritime Russia.

Legend has it that this is pretty much the exact spot

where Peter the Great got off his horse

and declared, "Here will be a city."

Luckily, there was even an eagle hovering over his head as he spoke

to make it even more like an epic Bible story.

And Peter did have Pharaoh-like powers over his subjects.

He was able to bend his serfs, his nobles and even nature to his will.

So, with frightening speed,

what had been a mosquito-ridden marshland over there

was turned into this great city.

ORTHODOX CHORAL SINGING

Peter christened his city St Petersburg

and it would become the home of the Romanov dynasty,

eclipsing Moscow for more than two centuries.

The first building Peter constructed was the Peter and Paul Fortress.

St Petersburg began as a military base,

because Peter had declared war on Sweden.

The timing seemed right.

Sweden had a new and teenage king, Charles XII,

and Peter hoped to take advantage of Charles's inexperience

to establish Russia as a Baltic power.

I think there was the thought

that the young Charles XII might prove an easier target

than his more celebrated ancestors had done,

but it was still quite a risky project to take on.

There was no sense that Sweden was in any sense a declining power

and, of course, behind Sweden -

this was the crucial Swedish advantage -

lay the diplomatic power of Louis XIV,

the greatest international power of all.

The Swedes were French clients in diplomacy,

so it was certainly risky to try anything on.

War with Sweden gave Peter the excuse

to fulfil perhaps the longest-held of all his dreams.

With its easy access to the Baltic Sea,

St Petersburg became the base for Peter's next grand project...

..the building of a navy.

Hello! Are you Captain Vladimir?

-Hello. Welcome on board Shtandart.

-Ah, thank you!

-May I help you in?

A fine ship, the Shtandart.

Thank you very much.

-Please come on board.

-Thank you.

Let's have a look. Guns, cannons, ropes.

This is a replica of Peter the Great's flagship frigate,

his pride and joy,

the Shtandart.

Peter sailed in the 1703 original himself.

It was modelled on the Royal Transport,

the English ship he was given by William III.

Stand by for departure.

The Shtandart was the biggest of ten ships

that Peter managed to build in just five months.

As the war with Sweden escalated,

the fleet had to be constructed at breakneck speed.

She's brave!

Oh!

SHE GASPS What's the word for "fantastic"?

-Fantastic.

-Fantastic!

Now Peter's time in the shipyards of Amsterdam and London really paid off.

He set his imported Dutch and English experts to work,

alongside Russians who'd learned shipbuilding

during the Grand Embassy.

Above all, it was probably Peter's own hands-on involvement

that ensured the Shtandart was completed so quickly.

-Midships now.

-Yes, Captain Vladimir.

Peter's new and untested navy

would be like David taking on the Swedish Goliath.

The Shtandart had to be more powerful

and more manoeuvrable than anything the Swedes could muster.

Captain Vladimir, in 1703, when the Shtandart was completed,

was she a very state-of-the-art vessel?

For that time, the steering wheel

was a kind of technological innovation, very advanced.

The steering wheel came on the stage in 1700, 1701.

Oh! Not very long before...

In 1703, the Russian fleet was equipped with a steering wheel,

which made ships very manoeuvrable

and very well controlled, so that was something very special,

and artillery, the cannons were very powerful. That was six-pounders

-and, for a ship of that size, that is quite powerful cannons.

-Yes.

What was it like, then, when Peter the Great and his crew were sailing?

Who would be here? What would be happening?

150 people, 28 cannons, four persons per cannon,

so they would be standing by next to the cannons,

and the sailors, they would have to operate all sails at once,

so in battle, during the manoeuvres, the sailors would be standing by

on lines for bracing the yards, for hoisting sails, for shaking sails.

'Peter was gambling that his new ships and their crews

'would give the Swedes a nasty surprise, and they did.'

Ready for attack!

The Shtandart soon saw action,

exchanging fire with Swedish warships

while defending Kronstadt... CANNONS BOOM

..the Russian naval base in the Gulf of Finland.

Over the next six years,

in what became known as the Great Northern War,

Peter used sea and land forces

to consolidate his position in the Baltic region.

On several occasions, he led his own men into battle.

Do you admire him?

He's my hero, and that is because he was thinking

more about the country, not about himself.

His own wealth was not that important.

His life has a really clear target, goal and mission.

The Great Northern War dragged on for two decades

and in the early years Peter was sorely tested.

Charles XII of Sweden may have been young,

but he proved to be a formidable military commander.

Charles was preoccupied with war.

War was his main passion.

Peter was also very interested in war

and there is an argument that all reforms initiated by Peter

were actually dictated by his interest in war,

so we have two figures who had a very strong interest in war,

a very deep sense of involvement in international affairs,

so the conflict was unavoidable.

Despite the length of the war, Peter's decisive battle with Charles

came as early as 1709,

and it wasn't at sea,

it was hundreds of miles inland, at Poltava in the Ukraine.

The viciousness of the battle is captured

in this 18th-century mural in St Petersburg.

As you get closer, you realise that it's a mosaic.

It was painstakingly assembled from thousands of tiny pieces

of stained glass by an artist and scientist called Mikhail Lomonosov.

Here is Peter the Great with his very distinctive mullet haircut,

and he's got his sword out, ready to cut the heads off some Swedes,

and he's leading the troops in person, as he did in 1709.

The leader at the other side

is King Charles XII of Sweden up there. He's riding in a sedan chair,

because he'd hurt his foot before the battle.

You might also notice that he's much, much, much smaller

than Peter the Great in this image.

And in this little scene a blood-thirsty Russian,

showing his white teeth,

is about to skewer this poor Swede with his sword.

It was a decisive victory for the Russians,

but not just because of their bravery.

They also completely outnumbered the Swedes.

SHOUTING AND GUNFIRE

Poltava was a pivotal battle for Peter the Great,

because it allowed Russia to overtake Sweden

to become the dominant power in Baltic Europe.

The security of St Petersburg was now assured.

And in 1712, just three years after his victory at Poltava,

Peter made St Petersburg the new capital of Russia.

The city had grown rapidly in its first decade.

Large numbers of nobles and wealthy citizens

had relocated there from Moscow,

not out of choice - Peter had demanded it.

With its canals and stone buildings, resembling Venice or Amsterdam,

St Petersburg presented foreign visitors with Peter's vision

of a modern, Europeanised Russia,

one full of thriving commerce and rational order.

But the great irony was that the city only existed

because of Peter's autocratic and despotic powers

and because of the medieval institution of serfdom,

which he actually reinforced.

Thousands of serfs and forced labourers perished

while constructing his new capital.

It's famously said, of course,

that St Petersburg was a city built on human bones

and there's no doubt that it was an extraordinary business

to get it off the ground, because most of the ground

was totally unsuitable for building on it.

It's a swamp. The climate is very severe, the ground is very damp,

so a vast effort had to be put in by the state,

by the troops and by the state peasantry

in order to achieve what Peter wanted to achieve.

St Petersburg was built at enormous human cost,

so much so that it's almost obscene to discuss

whether it was worth it or not. We don't know how many people died.

It could have been up to 100,000.

What we do know is that every year 40,000 peasants were conscripted

to work on St Petersburg.

Now, some of them may not have arrived.

They may have fled before they got there,

they may have fled into the forests once they're in St Petersburg,

but the population of the city itself rose very slowly,

so I think we have to assume that many of those peasants died.

Peter's ruthlessness didn't stop at the palace gates.

When he got bored of his first wife, Evdokiya,

he packed her off to the convent in Moscow.

With her love of hard drinking and dwarf entertainers,

Evdokiya's replacement, Catherine,

was far more to Peter's taste.

Peter's eldest son, and his putative successor, Alexei,

presented a more intractable problem.

Now in his 20s, Alexei seemed incapable of

and uninterested in following in his father's footsteps.

Peter was willing to give Alexei one last chance.

He wrote him a letter full of admonitions

telling Alexei to get his act together

and if Alexei failed, well, then Peter had a threat to make -

"I will cut you off like a gangrenous member,

"for if I have not spared myself in the service of our country,

"why should I spare you?"

In 1716, poor old Alexei fled Russia for Vienna.

Peter was furious. He suspected a conspiracy.

He knew that elements of the nobility

resented the way he'd unilaterally declared war on Sweden

and moved the court to St Petersburg.

Might they now be rallying around his son?

Peter enticed Alexei back to St Petersburg.

He promised him clemency.

But then he had him locked up.

Here at the fortress, Alexei was interrogated under torture.

He was whipped, and when his back was all covered in blood

he admitted, as anybody would do,

that he HAD conspired and plotted against his father.

A court sentenced poor Alexei to execution,

but before this could happen he was discovered mysteriously dead.

Some people think that this was the effects of the torture,

others, that he'd been poisoned,

in order to spare Peter the Great the humiliation

of having to publicly execute his own son.

Every single day at noon, a gun fires from the Peter and Paul Fortress.

This tradition stretches right back to the early days of St Petersburg,

when cannon shots served as a warning of floods

or marked important state occasions.

In 1725, Peter the Great heard the sound for the last time.

Odin, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat', ogon'!

LOUD BANG

He took ill and died on February 8th.

An autopsy reveals that Peter had gangrene at the bladder.

He was just 52.

Russia had lost more than a tsar.

Just three years earlier, on the back of his Baltic conquests,

Peter had been proclaimed Emperor.

The Russian Empire would now last as long as the Romanov dynasty itself.

TRAIN HORN BLARES

In little more than a century of Romanov rule,

Russia had undergone an extraordinary transformation.

Mikhail I had inherited a war-torn backwater,

but he and his son Alexis used their absolute power

to bring stability and continuity.

But Russia would have remained obscure and backward

if Peter the Great hadn't developed a boundless vision

and then let nothing stand in his way.

He gave his country a navy,

a new capital, an empire,

and, above all, a future.

Peter reinvented Russia, and that's why they call him Peter the Great.

Half a century after Peter's death,

this statue was erected to him in St Petersburg.

It was designed by a French sculptor,

but the face was done by his 18-year-old female assistant...

..who modelled it on Peter's own real-life death mask.

The enormous granite boulder on which the Bronze Horseman sits

is said to be the largest stone ever moved by human hands.

It's hard not to think of all the broken backs and crushed limbs

involved in transporting it, but then, perhaps that's appropriate.

For all of Peter the Great's tremendous achievements,

I think it's hard to warm to him.

He may have dragged Russia kicking and screaming into the modern world,

but he did so with ruthlessness and sometimes with downright cruelty.

It's hard to think of another sovereign who worked so hard

for his people, yet who treated them with so little compassion.

Nevertheless, Peter changed Russia for ever.

He set the benchmark against which

all future Romanov rulers had to be measured.

But one of them would unashamedly claim Peter's mantle.

She was the woman who erected this monument to him.

THEY CHEER

Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great.

But if you look at their names on the base of the monument,

you might think that Catherine's

is in a slightly bigger font than Peter's.

Does this mean that she was even greater?

MUSIC: 1812 Overture by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Next time, we meet Catherine the Great,

the small-time German princess

who becomes a big-time Russian empress.

We'll explore a golden age of imperial architecture and culture.

And we'll see how everything that the Romanovs have achieved

ends up hanging in the balance, when Napoleon invades Russia.

THEY ROAR