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RUSSIA tsar. The successor of Michael was Alexis Mikhailovitch (1645-76). His first action was directed against Poland, which, by its political and religious persecution of the Orthodox of Little Russia, had lost the good will of the Cossacks and of the lower classes. A Cossack leader, Bogdan Khelmnicki, raised the banner of revolt, and after several battles the tsar also took up arms in 1654. The Russian armies marched against the Poles, and in a short time invaded the whole of Little Russia and Lithuania. A treaty of peace which was concluded in 1667 made Russia mistress of Kieff, Smolensk, and the right bank of the Dnieper, but reestablished Polish rule in Lithuania. This peace was made necessary by the Cossacks, who, unwilling to submit to authority, menaced the interior tranquility of Russia. One of them, Stenko Razin, put himself at the head of a large band of Cossacks of the Don, passed to the region of the Volga, caused peasants, Tatars, Tchiuvashi, Mordvy, and Tchermisi to revolt, and desolated eastern Russia. His hordes were routed by George Bariatinski near Simbirsk, and he was decapitated at Moscow in 1670. Under the Tsar Feodor Alexievitch (1672-82) the Ukraine and the territory of the Zaporoghi Cossacks definitively became Russian possessions, by the treaty of 1681 with Turkey.

D. Reforms of Peter the Great.—Modern Russia and its political greatness as a European state really begin with Peter the Great. Without him Russia would probably have remained an Asiatic power. Peter I the Great was the son of Alexis Mikhailovitch and his second wife Natalia Naryshkin. He was proclaimed tsar at the age of nine years, and his youth was threatened by the gravest perils. The ambitious Sophia, daughter of Alexis Mikhailovitch and his first wife, Maria Miloslayska, taking advantage of the minority of Peter, succeeded, by intrigue and cunning beyond her age, in holding the regency of the empire for seven years (1682-89), until she was driven from the throne and locked up in the Devici monastery, while her favorites and partisans died on the scaffold or in exile. Sole and absolute sovereign, Peter the Great wished to begin his reign with some great victory. Accordingly, he rapidly built a fleet, with which he compelled the capitulation of Azoff in 1696. This splendid success gave him great prestige. In 1697 he undertook a journey to Western Europe, where he visited Holland, England, and Austria, becoming a mechanic, visiting industrial establishments, and taking workmen and engineers into his employ, while at the same time he busied himself with politics. This voyage to Europe had disastrous effects upon internal order in Russia, for the clergy and the lower classes, with superstitious terror, believed that it would establish foreign influence in Russia, that is to say, would destroy the ancient religious customs of the land. The lower classes considered it sacrilegious to shave off the beard, just as the raskolniki, who were very numerous, regarded it as a crime to use tobacco. Both of these customs Peter the Great had brought to Russia; reports were spread that he was not of royal birth, but was the child of adultery, and that he was the Antichrist who was to be born in those times. Peter the Great returned to Moscow, and quenched the revolution in blood, causing a thousand people to be put to death amid tortures in a single week, and not hesitating to wield the axe himself to decapitate rebels. Two other military revolts, that of the Don Cossacks (1706) and the Cossacks of the Ukraine, which was brought about by the hetman Mazeppa, who had allied himself to Charles XII of Sweden, were crushed by Peter's generals.

The conquest of the Baltic led Peter the Great to make war on Sweden. The Russian troops were defeated in 1700 under the walls of Narva; but in 1701 Prince Seremeteff inflicted a severe defeat upon the Swedish general Slipenbach, near Fhresfer, and a more severe one in 1702 near Hummelsdorf, after which he took the fortress of Nienschantz which the Swedes had built at the mouth of the Neva. Narva fell into the hands of Peter the Great in 1704. In 1708 Charles XII of Sweden invaded Russia at the head of an army of 43,000 veterans, and took the way to Moscow through Lithuania; but a most severe winter and the want of provisions decimated his troops. On July 8, 1709, under the walls of Pultowa, a Russian army of 60,000 men attacked the Swedes, who were reduced to extremes by hunger and sickness. Both sides fought heroically, but the Swedish army was destroyed and Charles XII was compelled to seek refuge in Turkey. By this victory, which has remained famous in history, Russia raised her flag on the shores of the Baltic, while Sweden fell from the rank of a great European power.

Crowned with the halo of victory, Peter the Great displayed greater energy in his purpose to combine Western civilization with the ancient Russian life, preserving however those Russian customs that seemed to him to be useful to his empire. For example the serfdom of the agricultural classes was sanctioned by laws, and all the peasants were bound to fixed residence and to per capita taxation. The inhabitants of the cities were divided into guilds, according to trades or professions; foreigners were authorized to carry on commerce and to devote themselves to the industries in Russia; women were taken from their isolation and from the retirement of the terem; he instituted the directing senate to take the place of the ancient duma of the boyars; the provincial administration was reorganized; many abuses of the bureaucracy were rooted out; the army received a European organization, and was increased to 210,000 men; the ancient organization of the Russian Church was destroyed by the institution of the Holy Synod; religious tolerance was established; commerce and industry were developed; a great number of schools and printing-houses were founded; and at the mouth of the Neva he built his capital, St. Petersburg, the "window opened towards the West"; the head of Russia, as Moscow is its heart. And in order to reduce so many reforms to practice in the face of the hostility, sometimes open, sometimes covert, of his subjects, Peter the Great used all the resources of his iron will, all the arms that autocracy placed in his hands, not excluding violence and cruelty.

The work of these reforms did not take the mind of the great reformer from his military enterprises. In 1711 he crossed the Dniester at the head of 30,000 men, bent on the conquest of Constantinople; but an army of 200,000 Turks and Tatars on the banks of the Pruth compelled him to abandon his ambitious dream and to restore Azoff to Turkey. In 1713 the Russian fleet, under the direction of Admiral Apraxin and of Peter the Great himself, took possession of Helsingfors and Abo in Finland, and drew near to Stockholm. After a pause of a few years; war with Sweden was renewed in 1719 and continued until the peace of Nystad put an end to it in 1721, securing to Russia the possession of Livonia, Esthonia, Ingermanland, a part of Finland, and a part of Karelia. In the following year Russian troops marched to the frontier of Persia, invaded Daghestan, Ghilan, and Mazandaran, and took possession of Derbent.

But the military and political successes of Peter the Great were embittered by domestic tragedies. His first wife, Eudocia Lapukhina, was opposed to the reforms, and was therefore compelled to lock herself up in the Pokrovski monastery at Suzdal. The son of Eudocia, Alexis, held to his mother's ideas, and hated his father's reforms. He left Russia while Peter the Great was travelling in the West, and sought refuge at Vienna and Naples. Having been discovered, he returned to St. Petersburg, where his father subjected