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Describing Peter the Great, the Nobel-prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky wrote: "this monarch of six-foot-six did not suffer from the traditional Russian malady—an inferiority complex towards Europe. He did not want to imitate Europe, he wanted that Russia be Europe. Just like he himself, at least in part, was European, just like many of his friends and companions, just like the main enemies against who he warred."
In 1678, a few years before Peter the Great took the throne, the Russian Empire was home to around 20 million people. Around 40 percent of these were Russians. They were concentrated in central and northern Russia, with some settled in the Urals and western Siberia.
In the eighteenth century, Muscovy was transformed from a static, somewhat isolated, traditional state into the more dynamic, partially Westernized, and secularized Russian Empire. This transformation was in no small measure a result of the vision, energy, and determination of Peter the Great. Historians disagree about the extent to which Peter himself transformed Russia, but they generally concur that he laid the foundations for empire building over the next two centuries. [Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
Peter's reign raised questions about Russia's backwardness, its relationship to the West, the appropriateness of reform from above, and other fundamental problems that have confronted many of Russia's subsequent rulers. In the nineteenth century, Russians debated whether Peter was correct in pointing Russia toward the West or whether his reforms had been a violation of Russia's natural traditions. *
The era that Peter initiated signaled the advent of Russia as a major European power. But, although the Russian Empire would play a leading political role in the next century, its retention of serfdom precluded economic progress of any significant degree. As West European economic growth accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, which had begun in the second half of the eighteenth century, Russia began to lag ever farther behind, creating new problems for the empire as a great power.
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