Book Review - Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie

Over the past century Russia has been ruled by a succession of historical Titans. From Tsar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov Tsars; through the men who ran the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991 (among them: Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev); to the presidents of the new post-Soviet Russia (Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev), Russia's twentieth and twenty-first century leaders have had a tremendous, if not always positive, impact on world history.

One must go back to the eighteenth century to find the greatest of all Russian rulers, for perhaps no Russian head of state dominated his own nation - and the world of his times - than did Peter the Great (1672-1725). Peter, the Romanov Tsar who ruled Russia three centuries before our own, was truly a giant of his times - the first great autocrat of modern Russia. By the force of his indomitable will, he dragged Russia from her quaint, medieval ways, and planted her firmly in the modern world of the eighteenth century.

In his 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Peter the Great: His Life and World, historian Robert K. Massie masterfully chronicles the life of this mercurial, complex, and paradoxical man who became the greatest Tsar in Russian history, and one of the supreme figures in all of European history.

Massie's brilliant narrative depicts Peter as a man who literally and figuratively towered over his world. When he reached adulthood, he stood six feet seven inches tall. Here was a man of great passions. He loved his family and friends and hated his enemies with equal fervor. His closest friends - most of them advisors to his court and senior military officers - could do no wrong in his eyes, even though there is historical evidence that many advisors were corrupt.. Yet, he could banish his sister Sophia and first wife Eudoxia to convents when they fell out of favor, and order the arrest, torture, trial, and imprisonment of Alexis, his son and heir to the throne, for suspected treasonous activity.

Peter possessed many paradoxes. This absolute monarch disdained the glitter and ornate ceremony concomitant with his royal station, preferring instead the informal company of his close circle of friends. He also favored a simpler, more unadorned lifestyle. Forced to abandon his formal education when he ascended to the throne, Peter nevertheless continued his education informally, becoming reasonably literate in the process. He derived his greatest pleasures from working with his hands. Almost single-handedly, he built the first boats of the future Russian navy; it was also he who personally planned and built much of the new Russian city which now bears his name: St. Petersburg.

In addition to examining Peter's personal qualities, through Massie's masterful portrayal of Peter the man, Peter the Great: His Life and World vividly demonstrates how this intensely energetic Tsar used his forceful personality to transform Russia from a backward medieval kingdom of little consequence into a major European political and military power. Massie devotes the vast majority of Peter the Great to spinning a highly detailed, absorbing, and wonderfully written narrative of the events which led to Peter's - and Russia's - evolution.

Peter put his personal stamp on nearly every key historical event involving Russia in the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth. From his "Great Embassy" at age eighteen, when he traveled incognito to all the major western European capitals (becoming the first Tsar to do so), to his numerous wars with the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), to his ten-year long "Great Northern War" with Sweden and its king, Charles XII, Peter is seen as forcing the pace of events throughout Europe, thereby modernizing and expanding Russia and planting the seeds of future greatness for the nation he loved above all else.

Robert K. Massie is a noted American historian who has written several books on Russian history over the past thirty years. His most notable works, aside from Peter the Great, are The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, and the classic 1967 book, Nicholas and Alexandra, which tells the story of Russia's last Tsar and his family. Like these earlier works, Peter the Great is written with Massie's trademark beautifully crafted, smoothly eloquent prose. While reading this sumptuous biography, it's all to easy to forget you're actually reading a work of history imbued with tremendous scholarship!

MY VERDICT: Robert K. Massie has continued his fine tradition of writing extremely readable, highly entertaining, and factually sound biographies. With Peter the Great: His Life and World, he completely captures the essence of this towering eighteenth century figure, and does it in such a way as to make him totally relevant to today's readers. Peter the Great: His Life and World, is a biography that's indeed very well worth reading!