Absolutism 8 / Russia 1

1. Ivan IV was born in 1533 and ascended to the throne when he was three. He was insulted and neglected by the boyars after his mother died when he was eight. When he was sixteen, he pushed aside his boyar advisers and crowned himself tsar. He selected Anastasia of the popular Romanov family as his wife and declared war on the Mongols. He defeated the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan between 1552 and 1556, and during the course of these wars, he abolished the old distinction between hereditary boyar private property and land granted temporarily for service. In 1557, he went west and for the next twenty-five years fought against the large Polish-Lithuania state. He quarreled with the boyars over the war and blamed them for the death of Anastasia, causing him to strike down all who stood in his way. He executed boyars, their relatives, and their peasants and servants by a special corps of unquestioning servants who dressed in black and rode black horses. They confis-cated large estates, broke them up, and reapportioned them to the lower service nobility.

2. Patriarch Nikon introduced religious reforms in 1652 that wished to bring the corrupted Russian practices of worship into line with the Greek Orthodox church. The church hierarchy followed his orders, but the intensely religious common people resisted. Many people left the church and formed illegal communities of “Old Believ-ers,” who were found and persecuted. As many as twenty thousand burned themselves. The Russian people were alienated from the church, which became dependent on the state for its authority. The Cossacks again revolted and, under the leadership of Stenka Razin, attracted a great army of urban poor and peasants, killing landlords and government officials and proclaiming themselves free from oppression. The government de-feated the rebellion and the upper classes tightened serfdom even more.

3. Peter campaigned against Turkish forts and Tartar vassals in the Black Sea. He conquered Azov in 1696. He led a group of 250 Russian officials and young nobles on an 18-month tour of western European capitals while in disguise. He met foreign kings and experts and was impressed with the power of the Dutch and English. He en-tered into a secret alliance with Denmark and the later king of Poland to wage a war against Sweden. It had li-mited agricultural resources, a small population, great foreign territory but spread out, and a new and inexpe-rienced king. Danish king Charles XII defeated Denmark quickly in 1700 and forced the Russians to retreat to Moscow.

4. Peter tightened up Muscovy’s old service system and made it work. He forced every nobleman to serve in the army or in the civil administration for life. He created schools and universities to produce better soldiers and government officials. He required all noblemen to be sent away from home for five years to be compulsory educated. He established an interlocking military-civilian bureaucracy with fourteen ranks. He searched over-seas for talented foreigners and placed them in his service. He made a regular standing army of over 200,000. Russia won the Great Northern War and became a strong military power with the annexation of Estonia and much of Latvia. Many Western ideas flowed into Russia, a new class of educated Russians emerged, many Rus-sians hated Peter’s changes, and the split between the enserfed peasantry and the educated nobility widened.

5. The Baroque style came out of the reformed Catholic church with the encouragement of the papacy and the Jesuits. Its exuberance appealed to the senses of churchgoers and proclaimed the confidence and power of the Catholic Reformation. Dramatic baroque palaces symbolized the age of absolutist power. Palace building had become an obsession for rulers, as they were intended to overawe the people with the monarch’s strength and show their equality to Louis XIV. Schönbrunn, a Viennese Versailles, began construction in 1695 to celebrate Austrian military victories and Habsburg might. Charles XI began the construction of his Royal Palace in 1693 to commemorate the limiting of the aristocracy’s power. Frederick I of Prussia began his royal residence in Berlin in 1701 to honor his title of king.

6. In 1702, Peter’s army seized the Swedish fortress on one of the islands at the mouth of the Neva River. He wanted to build it as his new capital rather than ancient Moscow. A fortress was built on Peter Island, and a port and shipyards were built across the river on the mainland as a Russian navy came into being. At the Rus-sian victory at Poltava, Peter moved faster and ordered his people to build a city that would equal any in the world. His new city would be a window on Europe and make it easier to reform the country militarily and ad-ministratively. He carefully designed the city to be orderly and modern. He wanted broad, straight, stone-paved avenues; houses in a uniform line; large parks; canals for drainage; stone bridges; and street lighting. All social groups were forced to work in the creation of St. Petersburg. Every summer, the government drafted 20,000 to 40,000 peasants to labor in St. Petersburg for three months without pay. Nobles, merchants, and ar-tisans were commanded to live in St. Petersburg and pay for the city’s services.


1. Third Rome—The title given to Russia by Orthodox churchmen. After Constantinople fell in 1453, the tsars saw themselves as the heirs of both the caesars and Orthodox Christianity. The tsars believed they had unrestricted power because it was a God-given right.

2. Patriarch Nikon—A dogmatic purist whose reforms split the Russian Orthodox church in 1652.

3. “Time of Troubles”—The years from 1598 to 1613 where the close relatives of the deceased tsar fought each other and alternated between fighting and welcoming the Swedes and Poles. The Cossack Rebellion occurred during this time.

4. Cossacks and the Cossack Rebellion—Peasants who had fled from Ivan the Terrible to form free groups and outlaw armies. Cossack bands, led by former slave Ivan Bolotnikov, rallied peasants and slaughtered nobles and officials to find the true tsar who would restore their freedom of movement and allow them to farm for who-mever they pleased. The rebellion was crushed at the gates of Moscow and Ivan the Terrible’s son, Michael Romanov, became tsar in 1613.

5. Battle of Poltava—Peter’s reformed army defeated the smaller Swedish army at Poltava, Ukraine in 1709. Swe-den was never able to regain the offensive and at the end of the war, Russia annexed Estonia and much of Lat-via. Russia became the dominant power on the Baltic Sea and a great European power.

6. Prince Eugene of Savoy—He helped Emperor Leopold I with the relief of the besieged Vienna in 1683 and be-came Austria’s most famous military hero. He led the Austrian army, defeated the Turks, fought Louis XIV to a standstill, and guided the triumph of absolutism in Austria. He built the Winter Palace in Vienna and the Sum-mer Palace on the city’s outskirts.

7. The Summer Palace—Prince Eugene’s palace built by Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt. It was two building, the Lower Belvedere and the Upper Belvedere, completed in 1713 and 1722 respectively. It is awe-inspiring and a great example of Baroque architecture.


1. Stenka Razin led a group of Cossacks and raided the Persians on the Caspian Sea. He brought the bounty back, shared it, and became popular. In early 1670, with 7,000 Don Cossacks, he marched north to make everybody equal. They moved up the Volga River, sometimes with resistance, others with welcome. However, he was de-feated by Russia’s elite and killed in late 1670. He allowed people to believe that freedom was possible and be-came Russia’s most celebrated folk hero.

2. I would interpret Razin as first a criminal because he plundered from the Persians on the Caspian Sea. Howev-er, he later fought for the freedom of his people and so is thus a national hero.