59 Fun Facts About Peter the Great

Peter the Great was the first ruler of Russia to hold which title, from 1721?

Emperor. He took the title in 1721 to mark victory over Sweden after 21 years of war, and Russia called itself an empire from then on.

With which half-brother did Peter reign jointly until 1696?

Ivan V. Frail and sickly, he was crowned beside Peter in 1682 on a specially built double throne and left the governing to others until his death.

Peter, tsar at ten, was the grandson of the first tsar of which dynasty?

The Romanovs. The dynasty began in 1613, when his 16-year-old grandfather was elected tsar to end the years of chaos known as the Time of Troubles, and it reigned until 1917.

What was the hidden opening in the back of the boy tsar Peter's double throne for?

Whispering advice. The opening was hidden behind velvet so that an adult could prompt the two young tsars during audiences; tradition says the listener was their regent.

Which half-sister ruled Russia as regent for seven years after the 1682 military revolt?

Sophia. Her government made a lasting peace with Poland and a border treaty with China, but two failed campaigns against Crimea helped the 17-year-old Peter's backers force her out in 1689.

Which elite military corps rose in revolt in 1682, murdering some of Peter's relatives before his eyes?

The Streltsy. Peter never forgave them: when they rose again in 1698 he had hundreds executed or exiled and broke up the corps.

What did Peter call the 'grandfather of the Russian navy' and board to review his Baltic fleet in 1723?

His boyhood sailboat. Peter pulled the derelict boat from a storehouse on a royal estate in 1688, had a Dutch carpenter repair it and learned to sail against the wind in it.

In which Moscow suburb did the young Peter make Dutch, Swiss and Scottish friends?

The German Quarter. Despite its name, it was the suburb where Moscow's western Europeans of every nation lived: to Russians of the day, all such foreigners were 'Germans'.

Where did Peter send his first wife, Eudoxia, after returning from Europe in 1698?

A convent. Eudoxia outlasted him: when her grandson Peter II came to the throne in 1727 she was freed and brought back to Moscow with a generous allowance.

Which fortified monastery outside Moscow sheltered the 17-year-old Peter when he fled a feared attack in 1689?

Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius. It was both a strong fortress and one of Russia's holiest places, and as soldiers and churchmen rallied to Peter there the regent's power drained away.

In his last winter, Peter sent which navigator to find out whether Asia and America were joined?

Vitus Bering. He sailed through the strait that now carries his name in 1728, but bad weather hid the American shore, and it took a second voyage in 1741 for him to sight Alaska.

Why did Tsar Peter serve as a mere bombardier in his own army in 1695?

To show promotion is earned. He kept a mock tsar, the 'Prince-Caesar', who handed him each new step like any other officer, and he expected his nobles to start at the bottom too.

Which Ottoman fortress near the Don did Peter capture in July 1696 with his new Voronezh navy?

Azov. His first siege in 1695 had failed because Turkish ships kept the fortress supplied, so he spent the winter building a fleet to cut it off by water, and it surrendered.

What was the name of Peter's 18-month incognito journey to Western Europe from 1697?

The Grand Embassy. Some 250 strong, it set out to win allies against the Ottomans and failed, but came home having hired the shipwrights, engineers and officers Peter wanted.

Peter toured western Europe in 1697 under a false name, so what made him easy to recognise anyway?

His great height. At about two metres he towered over almost everyone he met, though the alias still did its real job: sparing him the ceremonies owed to a visiting monarch.

Mobbed by sightseers after a week in the village of Zaandam, Peter moved his shipbuilding studies to which nearby city?

Amsterdam. In Zaandam he had lodged with a blacksmith he knew from Moscow, in a tiny wooden house that survives as a museum, but word of who he was got out within days.

For four months in 1697, Peter worked as a ship's carpenter in a yard belonging to which organisation?

The Dutch East India Company. A Dutch mayor who knew Russia well arranged it, and the company laid down a new frigate just so that the tsar and his Russian volunteers could help build it.

Which Dutch scientist gave Peter an 'eel viewer'?

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. The device was one of the single-lens microscopes he made himself, set up so that the tsar could watch blood circulating in a living eel whenever he liked.

Which skill, learned on his 1697 travels, did Peter like to practise on his own courtiers?

Pulling teeth. He picked up the craft in Holland, tried it out at once on his own servants, and for the rest of his life kept the teeth he drew.

After Peter's party wrecked John Evelyn's house at Deptford in 1698, which famous architect was sent to assess the damage?

Christopher Wren. As the King's surveyor he toured the house with the royal gardener; Evelyn's servant had already warned his master that it was 'full of people, and right nasty'.

Which king of England welcomed Peter to London in 1698 and gave him a royal yacht?

William III. He also lent Peter a furnished house beside the Deptford dockyard and paid his bills.

Russians who paid Peter's special tax carried a token proving their right to keep what?

Their beards. Back from the West, Peter cut off his nobles' beards with his own hands; the tax was the compromise for men who would rather pay than shave.

Before Peter's 1700 calendar reform, Russians counted their years from which event?

The world's creation. Peter restarted the count from the birth of Christ and moved New Year from 1 September to 1 January, but kept the old Julian days rather than the newer Gregorian ones.

When the office of Patriarch of Moscow fell vacant in 1700, what did Peter do?

Refused to name a replacement. He left the post empty for 21 years, then abolished it and put the Church under a board of bishops watched by a lay official he chose himself.

Peter's first attempt to seize the Baltic coast ended in disaster at which 1700 battle?

Narva. A far smaller Swedish army attacked out of a snowstorm blowing into Russian faces, yet Peter later called the rout a blessing: 'Necessity drove away sloth.'

After a crushing defeat by Sweden in 1700, what did Peter order melted down to make cannons and mortars?

Church bells. He had lost almost all his artillery in the rout, and bell metal was the quickest way to replace it: some 300 new guns were soon cast.

Saint Petersburg began in May 1703 as an island fortress now named for which pair of saints?

Peter and Paul. The fortress came first and the city grew up around it; from about 1720 its cells held the state's political prisoners, a role it kept for two centuries.

To free up skilled workers for his new capital, what did Peter forbid?

Stone buildings anywhere else in Russia. The ban sent every mason to the marshy site, where tens of thousands of conscripted serfs also laboured each year in conditions that killed many of them.

The Italian traveller Francesco Algarotti gave Saint Petersburg a lasting nickname in 1739, calling it Russia's what onto Europe?

Window. He wrote of a 'great window recently opened in the north through which Russia looks on Europe': Peter had built the city on captured marshland to give Russia the Baltic port it lacked.

Who moved Russia's capital from Saint Petersburg back to Moscow in 1918?

The Bolsheviks. Lenin moved the government in March 1918 to get it away from the border and the advancing Germans, ending two centuries in which Peter's city had outranked Moscow.

Peter's decisive 1709 victory over the Swedes came at which battle in Ukraine?

Poltava. Peter had fallen back for a year, burning the country as he went, so the invaders reached the field hungry and short of supplies; their rout ended Sweden's time as a great power.

Which king of Sweden was Peter's great adversary in the Great Northern War?

Charles XII. King at 15, he routed Peter's army at 18; after his own defeat in Ukraine he spent five years among the Turks, urging them to attack Russia, and died in battle in 1718.

Which favourite of Peter rose from humble origins, by legend a pie-seller, to prince, field marshal and Russia's most powerful man?

Alexander Menshikov. After Peter's death he ruled Russia in all but name, then fell just as fast: stripped of his titles and fortune in 1727, he died in distant exile two years later.

Which 1721 agreement ended the Great Northern War, giving Russia Ingria, Estonia and Livonia?

The Treaty of Nystad. After 21 years of war it gave Russia the eastern Baltic shore, while Sweden got most of Finland back and sank from a great power to a minor one.

Which state body did Peter create by decree in 1711 to replace the Boyar Duma?

The Governing Senate. Peter set it up to run the country while he was away fighting the Turks, and on his return he kept it as a permanent body, the highest office of state.

Peter's 1722 system sorting every officer and official into fourteen grades was called what?

The Table of Ranks. A commoner who climbed high enough on it became a hereditary noble, so officers and factory owners could now enter a class once closed to them.

Which German philosopher, made a privy councillor by Peter, gave him the plan for a Russian academy of sciences?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He advised the tsar from 1711 and last met him at the spa of Bad Pyrmont in 1716, but the academy he proposed opened only after both men were dead.

Peter's 1714 decree on compulsory schooling ordered the sons of nobles and officials to study which subject?

Mathematics. Graduates of his navigation school were sent out to teach arithmetic and geometry in new 'cipher schools', yet even under orders few pupils came.

Which reform did Peter help design to make Russia's secular books easier to read?

A simplified alphabet. His 'civil script' dropped obsolete letters and left the old lettering to religious books, so the look of a page told readers which world it belonged to.

Peter's drinking club, the 'All-Joking, All-Drunken Assembly', was famous for staging parodies of what?

Church rituals. A mock 'Prince-Pope' presided over the drunken ceremonies, yet Peter went to real services regularly and counted himself a dutiful Orthodox Christian.

Why did Peter bar younger men from taking vows as monks?

He thought monks were shirkers. Peter closed many monasteries and set the remaining clergy to useful work such as running schools and keeping parish registers.

Which peasant-born servant girl became Peter's second wife and, on his death in 1725, Russia's ruler?

Catherine I. Born Marta Skowronska, she had been taken prisoner in the war with Sweden; when Peter died without naming an heir, his leading courtiers and the palace regiments put her on the throne.

Which daughter of Peter seized the throne in 1741 and ruled for twenty years?

Elizabeth. Of his many children with his second wife only she and her sister Anna grew up; Anna's son later reigned as Peter III, so later tsars descended from Peter through a daughter, not a son.

Which son of Peter died in prison in 1718 after being convicted of treason and tortured?

Alexei. He had fled abroad to escape his father and was lured home in 1718, only to be tried for treason; he died in his cell before the death sentence could be carried out.

Legend says which act in the icy Gulf of Finland in 1724 hastened Peter's death?

Wading in to rescue drowning soldiers. Whatever the truth of the tale, what killed Peter that winter was the bladder and urinary illness that had troubled him for more than a year.

Legend says Peter's unfinished last note read what?

'Leave all to ...' is all he is said to have managed to write. The tale comes only from a Holstein official who, historians argue, wanted Peter's daughter Anna to be seen as his heir.

Peterhof, Peter's fountain palace on the Gulf of Finland, became known as what?

The Russian Versailles. Peter enlarged his plans after seeing the French court in 1717; the Grand Cascade below the palace runs 64 fountains around a giant Samson wrestling a lion.

Which ruler first had the forged 'Will of Peter the Great', a supposed plan to conquer Europe, published to justify a war?

Napoleon. The text grew out of a paper a Polish exile gave the French government in 1797; Napoleon's writers put it into print in 1812 to justify invading Russia, and it was still being quoted after 1945.

In which Pushkin poem does a statue of Peter come to life and chase a young man?

The Bronze Horseman. The debt runs the opposite way from what you might expect: the monument to Peter in his city had stood since 1782, and it took its popular name from the poem.

In the Hulu comedy-drama The Great, Nicholas Hoult plays Peter III, so which actor appears as his revered father, Peter the Great?

Jason Isaacs. The show calls itself 'an occasionally true story', and this is one of the untrue parts: the real Peter III was Peter the Great's grandson, the son of his daughter Anna.

What did Peter put on show in the Kunstkamera, founded in 1714 as Russia's first public museum?

Natural oddities. Peter ordered malformed stillborn babies and animals sent in from all over Russia, and displayed them to teach his subjects that they were accidents of nature, not monsters to be feared.

Peter's boyhood 'play regiments', formed for mock battles outside Moscow, grew into the first units of what?

The Imperial Guard. The playmates became the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky regiments, the nucleus of Peter's new army, and it was they who put his widow on the throne in 1725.

Peter's 1718 decree on 'assemblies', evening parties with dancing, forced which group out of seclusion?

Noblewomen. Wives and daughters who had lived apart in the women's quarters, the terem, were ordered into low-cut Western gowns and told to dance, drink and talk with men.

Which Cossack hetman, long in Peter's favour, went over to the invading Swedes in 1708?

Ivan Mazepa. He brought the invaders only a small force of Cossacks rather than the general rising they had hoped for, fled with them after their defeat the next summer and died within months.

Which electress, dining with Peter and her daughter in 1697, wished his manners were less rustic?

Sophia of Hanover found the tsar quick-witted and good company; after dinner his Russians danced with her ladies and took their whalebone corsets for bones.

Prince Matvei Gagarin, whom Peter later hanged for corruption, was the first governor of which governorate?

Siberia. Gagarin sent Peter hoards of ancient gold dug from its burial mounds, which survive as the Hermitage's Siberian Collection.

The Swedish fortress of Nöteborg, which Peter captured in 1702 and renamed Shlisselburg, guards the source of which river?

The Neva. Shlisselburg means 'key fortress': taking it let Peter push downriver and found Saint Petersburg near the mouth the following year.

Which Dutch master painted David and Jonathan, bought for Peter at auction in 1716 and hung at Peterhof?

Rembrandt painted the tearful farewell in 1642, soon after his wife Saskia died, and it may echo his own grief. It stayed in Peter's Monplaisir palace until 1882.

Peter's 1722-23 war forced which declining empire to cede Derbent, Baku and Gilan to Russia?

Safavid Persia signed the Caspian provinces away in 1723, but Russia handed them all back within twelve years as the general Nader Shah revived Persian power.