Page 69 - The Baltic Capitals & St. Petersburg

Peter the Great (ruled in 1689-1725) after defeating Sweden in the Great Northern War,
founded a new capital, Saint Petersburg. Peter succeeded in bringing ideas and culture from
Western Europe to a severely underdeveloped Russia. After his reforms, Russia emerged as a
major European power.

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of the great powers of Europe. In 1812, having gathered nearly half a million soldiers from
France, as well as from all of its conquered states in Europe, Napoleon invaded Russia but,
after taking Moscow, was forced to retreat back to Europe. Almost 90% of the invading forces
died as a result of on-going battles with the Russian army, guerillas and winter weather. The
Russian armies ended their pursuit of the enemy by taking his capital, Paris.

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attempted to curtail the tsar’s powers during the abortive Decembrist revolt (1825), which was
followed by several decades of political repression. Another result of the Napoleonic wars was
the incorporation of Bessarabia, Finland, and Congress Poland into the Russian Empire.

The perseverence of Russian serfdom and the conservative policies of Nicholas I of Russia
impeded the development of Imperial Russia in the mid-19th century. As a result, the country
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including Britain, France, Ottoman Empire, and Piedmont-Sardinia. Nicholas’s successor
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issued a decree abolishing serfdom in 1861. The Great Reforms of Alexander’s reign spurred
increasingly rapid capitalist development and Sergei Witte’s attempts at industrialization.

The failure of agrarian reforms and suppression of the growing liberal intelligentsia were
continuing problems however. Repeated devastating defeats of the Russian army in the
Russo-Japanese War and World War I and the resultant deterioration of the economy led to
widespread rioting in the major cities of the Russian Empire and to the overthrow in 1917 of
the Romanovs.

At the close of the Russian Revolution of 1917, a Marxist political faction called the Bolsheviks
seized power in Petrograd and Moscow under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The
Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party. A bloody civil war ensued, pitting
the Bolsheviks’ Red Army against a loose confederation of anti-socialist monarchist and
bourgeois forces known as the White Army. The Red Army triumphed, and the Soviet Union
was formed in 1922.

Russia as part of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union was meant to be a transnational worker’s state free from nationalism. The
concept of Russia as a separate national entity was therefore not emphasized in the early
Soviet Union. Although Russian institutions and cities certainly remained dominant, many
non-Russians participated in the new government at all levels. One of these was a Georgian
named Joseph Stalin. A brief power struggle ensued after Lenin’s death in 1924. Stalin

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