Peter the Great

Peter I became Tsar of all Russia in 1682, ruling jointly with his half-brother Ivan V until 1696. Much of his reign was consumed by wars against the Ottoman and Swedish empires; after victory in the Great Northern War, Russia annexed a significant portion of the eastern Baltic coastline and was officially raised to an empire in 1721. He organized a well-ordered police state and led a cultural revolution that replaced traditionalist systems with modern, scientific, Westernized ones based on the Enlightenment. In 1703, on the shores of the Neva River, he founded Saint Petersburg — later dubbed…