Peter I of Russia

Portrait of Peter I by Godfrey Kneller, 1698. This portrait was Peter's gift to the King of England.

Pyotr Alexeevich Romanov (June 9, 1672 – February 8, 1725), also known as Peter the Great, was a Russian monarch. He carried out a policy of Westernization and expansion that transformed the Tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire, a major European power.

Quotes

• Alas! I have civilized my own subjects; I have conquered other nations; yet I have not been able to civilize or to conquer myself.
  • Attributed in Sholto Percy and Reuben Percy, The Percy Anecdotes (1826), Vol. 1, p. 55

• A ruler that has but an army has one hand, but he who has a navy has both.
  • Attributed in Way a River Went: Following the Volga Through the Heart of Russia (2015), by Thom Wheeler, p. 163

Quotes about Peter I of Russia

• The history of the Romanovs is an Elizabethan tragedy that lasts for three centuries. Its keynote is cruelty, a barbaric, pointless kind of cruelty that has always been common in the East, but that came to Europe only recently, in the time of Hitler.
  • Colin Wilson in Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs, p. 61-62 (1964)

• Here is the model which I intend to follow for the whole of my reign.
  • Nicholas I of Russia, quoted in Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (1967), p. 200

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Peter I of Russia on Wikipedia