Forbidden History - Peter the Great: The Tsar Who Built Russia in Blood

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

In this episode of Forbidden History, join us as we explore the life of Peter the Great, who, despite his strange eccentricities, managed to wrestle Russia to the modern age. PATREON LINK HERE:  https://patreon.com/ForbiddenHistory?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLinkCast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Tracy Borman: Host Dominic Selwood: Journalist & Historian Tony McMahon: Author & Historian Nigel Jones: Journalist & Historian  Arthur Gamalily: Historian Yuri Chistov: Russian HIstorian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That was easy. Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. Our Patreon is now live. Head over and become a Forbidden Historian to unlock brand new exclusive episodes, including the very first episode in our brand new Patreon series, Forbidden History Inner Circle.

In this exclusive episode, we discuss the story of Nazis escaping to Egypt with me, your host, Eric Myers, joined by published author and historian Tony McMahon. head over to our Patreon for much more exclusive forbidden history content. Thanks for supporting the show. Peter the Great, he was the man who took a backward, inward-looking Russia and transformed it. He built the country's first navy, grew the Russian Empire, and turned it into a modern European power.

He also founded one of the greatest cities in the world, St. Petersburg. But while these achievements were clearly remarkable, a look into Peter's private life reveals that even more remarkable was the man who made them happen. In this episode of Forbidden History, Tracy Borman joins us to help investigate the private life of Peter the Great. We'll uncover his rocky family life, from the wife he forced to become a nun, to the son whom it said he personally tortured. We'll reveal the lengths he went to, to westernize his realm, bringing in the new, while ruthlessly throwing out the old. Anne will discover how he expressed his passions for progress and science in truly outlandish style by visiting the museum Peter himself established the Kunst camera, complete with his

bizarre collection of pickled human fetuses. Peter the Great was a massive contradictions, a modernized and a dictator, generous to his friends, but utterly cruel to his enemies. He dominated everyone he came into contact with, he knew what he wanted, and he was utterly ruthless in getting what he wanted. How did Peter govern Russia through the most debauched drinking club in history? How did a love of science manifest itself in the most gory of ways? And what was the traumatic childhood event that made one of the most enlightened rulers in

Russia's history, also one of the most brutal. This is the private life of Peter the Great. Peter was born in Moscow in 1672. His father was Russia's ruler, Tsar Alexis, who died when Peter was just four years old. His mother was Tsariza Natalia. Because Natalia was Alexis's second wife, Peter's childhood was dominated by a power struggle between the families of the two wives, who each fought to have the throne

pass down their line. The Nadeshkina's back Peter, and the Miloslavsky's, his sickly brother, Ivan. Technically, it would have gone and did go to Fyodor, the oldest son, that was Peter's half-brother. When he died early, the next in line was Ivan, the other half-brother, who was mentally and physically.

incapable of reigning, and the council saw that at an early stage. And against the opposition of the regent, Sophia, Peter had the character to go for it, and therefore the succession fell on him and he became Tsar. But Ivan's faction acted fast. Within weeks of Peter's accession, they sparked a revolt of the Strzzi. The Strzzi were a kind of imperial bodyguard who was sworn to protect the Tsar and the government. The trouble was the legitimate government was. And they were whipped up by Ivan at one stage, his Miloslavsky faction, into revolt. And they began to think they could decide who was

going to be the Tsar. So they organized a revolt against Peter's own family and then teamed up with his sister against Peter. They came to the Kremlin in Moscow, took it over and massacred many of the top officials who they blamed for various ills and grievances that they are built up. And they reacted in a savage way. They threw men, women, and children onto the points of their spears. The horror and bloodshed of the brutal revolt was witnessed by the 10-year-old Peter himself, and it was to scar him permanently. The revolt ended in a compromise.

Peter would rule jointly with Ivan. But as Peter was only ten, and Ivan weak, power increasingly fell into the hands of Ivan's older sister, Sophia. Sophia was clever, and a schemer, and took control of the government, pushing Peter out. He and his mother fled to a village outside of Moscow, and lived in permanent fear for their safety. Growing up away from the palaces and courts of his forefathers, Peter became a very different kind of man. Peter from an early age was not a member of the rather stiff and stilted court, the imperial court in Moscow. He was brought up in a village to the east of the city and he was more or less given free realm.

He mingle with peasants from an extremely early age got interested in things like ships and sailing. This had the effect of making him scornful of conventions and the conservative social norms of the Zahar. caught and in many ways made him his own man a wild free spirit. Early in 1689, when Peter was 17, his mother arranged for him to marry a young woman called Eudoxia. While she soon fell pregnant with a son who would be called Alexi, Peter did not take to her, and indeed his relationship with his son would go on to be similarly poor. He much preferred the company of a Westphalia wine merchant called Anna Mons, who became his mistress. Hard to imagine that Udoxia was ever going to please Peter.

I mean, she was dodgy, she was puritanical, she was terribly conservative. On contrast along comes Anna Mons. Peter likes to drink. She's the daughter of a wine merchant, perfect, and they can match each other drink for drink, and she's jolly good fun, so he preferred Anna. Later that same year, another revolt occurred in the palace. Sophia tried to use it to her advantage, but this time she failed. Peter removed her from power, and in a form of punishment that was to become a bit of a favorite of his,

he banished her to a convent. Peter's childhood had been a combination of bitter family feuds, and a rather pleasant but very unroyal upbringing away from court, followed by more fighting that finally put him on the throne. This unconventional early life would go on to produce a very unconventional man. In 1691, Peter established the all-joking, all-drunken synod of fools and gestures. The synod held parties, which would start at noon and go on till dawn the next day. There was ceremony on an insane level.

His old tutor was appointed Prince Pope, who presided over proceedings wearing a tin hat and a coat half made of gambling cards. He sat on a beer barrel. There were gestures, giants, a circus of dwarfs, obese freaks and dancing girls. Peter instructed that the Prince Pope be worshipped with excessive drinking and gave officials of the synod obscene titles, all too rude to say here. But to give you a flavor, there was also a group of courtiers carrying suggestively shaped sausages on cushions.

At the drunken synod, Peter himself was the master of the revels. He had this enormous physical energy, this restlessness, may have been related to his epilepsy, that he would be dashing around, messing people's hair up, banging drums, going outside, letting off artillery, letting off fireworks, basically letting off steam, and he had a lot of steam to let off. All this alcohol consumption at some point was going to claim a victim.

And Yakov Tuggenov was one of the members and a buddy of Peter. And the Tsar organized a kind of mock wedding for him, where basically traditional Russian customs were completely ridiculed. I mean, typical behaviour of the synod. And there was a whole heap of drinking. Unfortunately, poor Yakov Tuggenov couldn't quite take it. and he died during his own wedding. It all sounds utterly ridiculous, and plainly it was,

but behind the debauchery lay a serious purpose. As Peter grew in his power, the group turned into the Synod of Fools and Gestors, and it became an important part of government, growing to the extent where the members were any cabinet minister or government official who wanted any influence at all, and even members of the clergy.

Peter saw his predecessors as prisoners of dull religious ritual, and the synod was how he broke free from that, imposing his autocratic power in a new way. The power he wielded then went beyond the outrageous parties and would become crucial as he began the controversial reshaping of his realm. First, in spring 1695, he attacked the Ottoman fortress of Azov. He failed, so he went and built Russia's first first time. ever Navy. He tried again and succeeded, but the experience had taught him something. Russia was

lagging behind its rivals, and it became Peter's mission to modernize his backwards realm. But first, he wanted to forge alliances and acquire knowledge. So he went on his grand embassy, basically a gap year tour of the more advanced Europe. Peter found, especially in England, almost everything about the modern world that fascinated him. He would take watches to bits and put them together. He would go and visit the Royal Mint in the Tower of London. In fact, he could barely tear himself away from it and kept going back. He loved looking at the new architecture of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Royal Naval College. Fantastic. This city that had risen from the ashes of the great fire gave him, I think, the germ of the idea for the city that he would found, St. Petersburg.

Peter the Great loved attending anatomy demonstrations, dissections in Amsterdam. And one of the courtiers was quite revolted by the spectacle, and Peter the Great forced him to bite a piece off the corpse and chew it. And Peter also carried around his own surgical instruments, and he'd offered to pull people's teeth. Well, not offer. He insisted on pulling people's teeth, which no doubt made many of the courtiers keep their dental problems to themselves.

Both enlightened and crass, Peter caused wonderment and shock in equal measure everywhere he went. He could be respectful, or he could be rude at any given moment, and few instances show the negative sides of his personality more than the way he treated his accommodation while staying in London. John Evelyn was a well-known diarist and essayist at the time of Peter the Great. He had a beautiful house in Deptford and lovely gardens that he'd ended for 40 years, and he decided to make all this available to Peter the Great while he went off somewhere else. Unfortunately, Peter the Great behaved like a 70s rock star in a hotel room.

He just trashed the entire place. So when John Evelyn comes back to his own home, he finds all the chairs have been used for firewood, the paintings in his house have been used for dartboard practice, the windows were smashed and his beautiful garden had been totally destroyed, Because they developed this game with the wheelbarrows in the garden, and Peter the Great would be carted around and they'd smash through hedges, a walls and so on.

And a very angry Evelyn demanded that the British state pay for all the repairs, which came to about £350, an enormous sum at the time. Peter's wild tour of Europe came to an abrupt end when in July 1698, he was informed that the Streltsy had once again revolted back in Russia. He had his army deal with the uprising, but cut his trip short and returned home. He arrived back in Moscow in September to be greeted by a welcome party of bearded boyers. After a year in modern, clean-shaven Europe, it was like going back in time. That had to change.

After embracing those present, Peter took out a barber's razor and began cutting off their beards. At the stroke of the razor, the elite of Russian society were utterly transformed, superficially at least, into Europeans. The problem was, at the time, a beard was seen as god-given by Russians. So, while it might be amusing now, to those present, it was utterly horrifying. The size of your beard, in a way, was a measure of your virility and your worth and your social status. All this was completely different. beards had gone out of fashion in the West, most people were clean-shaven, and Peter identified

shaving the non-wearing of beards with modernity and with progress. The Orthodox Church was furious. I mean, they regarded this as blasphemous, but he even introduced a tax, and if you wanted to grow a beard, you had to pay for it. Beards dealt with. He moved on to Eudoxia, the wife he'd been shackled to at the age of 17 and had never taken to. He kidnapped their son from her and sent her to a convent. Next on his list were those who'd rebelled against him in his absence, and as they discovered, Peter did not do punishment by half measures. Over a thousand of those involved in the revolt were put through torture chambers,

to be crippled or maimed before being beheaded, hanged, cut to pieces bit by bit, or broken on the wheel to die in agony. Bodies were hung from gates at every entrance to the city as a reminder of what happened to people who crossed the Tsar. Moscow, Peter said, would be saved not by pity, but by cruelty. For him it was torture by day and parties at the drunken synod by night. Visit BetMDM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick.

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True to his hands on nature, Peter took personal charge of the torturing of the Streltze. He himself flogged them. Sometimes they were roasted alive. Their bleeding bats were held over open flames. They were wracked and their limbs were torn from the joints. Peter saw all this. He took part in all this. He supervised this.

I think he probably enjoyed it. Executions for all sorts of crimes were pretty common in Europe at around this time. But even by the standards of the time, Peter the Great could be pretty sadistic. And, I mean, there's one instance where the ex-lover of his wife was impaled and the execution took 14 hours in public. It was all about making an example not to rebel. And so, by the end of the year, beards had been cut, sleeves had been slashed.

The Zaryza Udoxia was in a monastery, and the Strzrelzi had been almost destroyed. With internal disorder quelled, he turned his attention back to modernization. First on his list was an outlet on the Baltic for lucrative trade routes with Western Europe, and that meant taking on Sweden. Sweden was being ruled by King Charles XVI, and since he was only 18 years old, Peter and his allies spied an opportunity. So from his bedchamber porch in the Kremlin, Peter declared war on Sweden, but it was not going to be an easy victory.

In fact, it would become a struggle that would last over 20 years. King Charles Xer12th of Sweden was a very energetic young man, possibly gay, known as the Swedish meteor, the lion of the north, and he's really the man through his wars with Russia who turns the young Tsar Peter into Peter the Great. Charles was equally as visionary and as stubborn as Peter himself was. And in this two-decade-long battle, the two turned into the bitterest of rivals, but also foes with a growing but grudging deep respect for each other.

Things didn't start well for Peter. Russia suffered a catastrophic defeat at the First Battle of Narva in November 1700. But when Sweden was forced to counter the threat from him. Peter's allies, Russia was able to regroup. By 1703, it had captured a fort on the River Neva, called the Nskans. But Peter ordered the construction of his own fort, the Peter and Paul Fortress. Peter soon began to see it as a foundation stone, not only of the fortress, but of a new capital city. It was also symbolic of his ambitions for Russia and a catalyst to help achieve them. It was his window on the west, and its name was, of course, St. Petersburg.

St. Petersburg certainly wasn't an ideal place to build a city. It was marshy, it was unhealthy, hardly anyone lived there, it was very difficult to get stones and supplies and water and food up there. But simply speaking, it was where Peter wanted to build it, and it was where it was built. By the time the construction of St. Petersburg was underway, Peter had lost interest in his mistress, Anna Mons, and had moved on to the 19-year-old Catherine. Not much is known of her origins, but it seems likely that she was the daughter of a peasant, probably of Lithuanian or Scandinavian background. She had the qualities that Peter had not found in another woman. She was kind-hearted and compassionate, and was one of the few people who could keep up with his relentless drive and energy.

The pair fell very much in love. In the winter of 1704, Catherine had a child who they named Peter. The couple would produce 12 children, 10 of which would sadly die very young. But while Eudoxia was still alive, Peter hesitated about marrying Catherine. When they did eventually get married, in the autumn of 17. It was in secret. It was a rebellion. It was against all the norms and conventions, the traditions of czarism.

And that was why he and she kept it secret, because he knew that the court would not approve this marriage to a rather obscure, not wealthy, not really from the higher nobility, from the Boya families. so he kept it secret. While his private life was taking shape, albeit very much behind closed doors, Russia was still embroiled in the war with Sweden. Peter's dedication to the marshy patch of land

where his city was growing was preventing the pair for making peace. But in June 1709, on the fields of modern-day Ukraine, he had a breakthrough. The Battle of Poltava was a decisive victory for Russia. and really the death knell for Sweden's war aspirations. It marked the point where Russia became a great European power, and Peter pressed his advantage.

In the spring of 1710, he swept unopposed through Sweden's Baltic provinces, creating a buffer zone for his beloved St. Petersburg. Russia would no longer be the obscure old Muscovy. It was a western and westernizing power in its own right, and because of its numbers and because, of the changes that Peter had made, every other European country from henceforth would have to take account of Russia. But something was playing on Peter's mind. He'd now been supported for nearly ten years by his wife, Catherine,

but their marriage was still a secret. He thought this was unfair, and so in February 1712, he threw caution to the wind and married her in public with the ceremony she deserved. She became a close confidant and encouraged his aspirations. She was also the person he turned to for comfort when a problem that had plagued him throughout his life became worse. All his life, Peter had a nervous tick, although it seems to have been aggravated by alcoholism and possibly venero disease. And he also have these terrible convulsions,

which would start with his neck twisting and then his facial muscles contorting. And all of this seemed to happen at periods of great stress and clearly must have horrified his courtiers and all those around him. When attacks took hold, Catherine would be sent for. She would lay him down, hold his head, and gently stroke his hair in temples until the convulsions calmed down and he fell asleep. But for a man of action such as Peter, sleep was something he had little time for.

His ambitions for St. Petersburg were growing by the day. To find out more about its construction, we're meeting historian Arthur Gamley. We are the Admiralty. The centre of Russian shipbuilding of that time initiated, of course, by Peter the Great with his unquenchable love for the sea and the ships. And he thought of himself as a master of a ship, and Russia is at that ship. he's destined to rule and to teach and to get into the open sea. But also it was that precisely the third attempt of his

to let down the foundation of a regular city. And now he had the great help of that French architect Leblanc invited, especially by the d'Arts. And it was Leblanc who came up with that famous chident scheme. of the three main thoroughfares of the city coming off from the Admiralty and that was precisely that scheme that marked the city's architecture,

the plan of it for the centuries to come. And you still see that today? We still do, we feel it, and we have Peter on every stone we want from. Excellent. One of the buildings still standing from Peter's time is the summer palace, and like much of the city, he was very particular about building it in stone.

The problem was that the city was surrounded by marshland, but that would not hold his dream. Peter was so fussy to see his paradise, you know, grow, that he ordered that no stone building anywhere else in Russia should go on, that all stone buildings should be stopped in Russia except for St. Peter's bag. But there's another problem. Yet again, we're back to those incredibly severe conditions of the area around where he wanted to build his paradise. No stone.

What Peter does, again, with his power of inventiveness and his will to go through to his dream, he introduces a tax. and one of the very particular St. Petersburgian taxes he introduced was to bring stone into the city. So anyone going to the city would have to bring these two or three stones with him depending really on the ways

he could carry them with a ship or other means. And that is how we constructed that city. So the summer palace that Peter constructed was, of course, very influenced by the palaces, the royal residences that he'd seen on the Grand Embassy in Western Europe. But it did have a very Russian, a very petrous touch. In that beneath the lovely open windows and the paintings, he had his own private torture chamber, which you wouldn't have found in Kensington Palace, for example.

As St. Petersburg was taking shape, Peter's thoughts turned to the future and the succession. The problem was his son and heir Alexei had grown up in a very different way to his father. Alexei didn't have exactly what you'd call a stable childhood, you know, when your own father kidnaps you when you're eight and sends your mother to a convent. And there was a real clash of personalities between him and his father. You know, he's the kind of bookish nerd, you know, who's into poetry and he's into the fine arts, whereas Peter is the kind of the jock, basically, he's into building stuff.

I mean, the two of them were never going to get on. As he began to see that Alexei was everything that he despised in Russia, old, traditional, backward-looking, I think this combined with his neglect of the boy to produce something which actually was very close to murderous hatred. And as Peter's reforms changed so much of traditional, Russian society, it created opposition, and many of these people started to turn to Alexi in the hope that he would go on to undo his father's controversial work.

Alexei actually tried to keep out of Peter's way physically. He tried to distance himself. And there's an exchange of letters in which Peter threatens the boy with the traditional punishment that he issued to all his relatives who got in his way, that he would send him into a monastery, or in the case of women, to a nunnery, if he didn't bow the knee and do what his father wanted. But Alexei didn't. He got involved with the opposition to Peter. He may well have conspired actively against his father, and therefore he brought about his own destruction. On the morning of the 3rd of February 1718, he was brought before Peter. His son dropped to his knees and acknowledged his guilt, begging forgiveness. Peter initially pardoned him on condition that he'd

tell the whole truth about his former conduct and reveal the names of those who'd secretly supported him, and Alexei talked. Many of those he named were condemned to a slow, cruel death before a huge crowd of spectators. But still, Peter's doubts were not satisfied, and so he ordered that his own son be tortured. On the 26th of June 1718, while undergoing a torture session, Alexei died. It was officially given out that Alexei had died of natural causes,

that he'd got an illness and sadly passed away. In fact, the evidence is pretty clear that Alexei was flogged with the traditional brutal Russian whip, the knout, which is rather like a more savage version of the old English catarine tales. Peter himself wielded the nout. He probably, almost certainly, flogged his own son. I think he had two sessions, one with 15 strokes and one with 25 strokes.

And so Peter literally tortured his own son to death. Was Alexei really a threat to his father while Peter lived? Probably not. Would he have overturned Peter's modernized? reforms, once his father had died. Probably not. For Peter, it was not worth the risk. Sometimes, however, his brutality seems totally unjustifiable. Such as when he found out his former mistress, Mary Hamilton, had been sleeping with his adjutant and been pregnant three times. It began with a session in the torture chamber. Mary confessed to killing three babies.

so Peter sentenced her to death by beheading. On the 14th of March 1719, she mounted the scaffold. Peter kissed her and told her he wouldn't bend the rules to save her. Mary fainted. The executioner brought down his sword. Peter picked up the head and proceeded to give the crowd an anatomy lesson, pointing out the windpipe, vertebrae, and gushing arteries, before kissing it and throwing it to the ground.

The torturing of his son, the beheading of his mistress, were both part of the darker side of Peter's personality and can make it hard to see him as Peter the Great. But there was another side to him that was far more progressive. He instituted a lot of reforms that are sometimes forgotten. I mean, for example, he banned the infanticide of babies who were deformed from birth. He got rid of arranged marriages, and at the wedding ceremony, the groom no longer wielded a whip, as had been the tradition, but seal the deal with a kiss. Nowhere encapsulates his forward-thinking mindset better than the Kunst Camera, the museum he established, and the first ever in Russia.

But at first glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the strange collection contained within is yet another example of Peter's day. darker side. Peter created a cabinet of curiosities. They were very popular at the time for natural and historical science. But it wasn't that he had an unusual interest in that side of nature. It was more that he wanted to modernise the thinking of the Russian people to show them that there were no monsters. These were natural creations of the natural world. This was an attempt to sweep away superstition. So why was it so important to Peter that he advanced medicine and science in this way? I think the most important thing was to create the medical schools and to teach students in Russia. It was very important to produce medicines.

because it was a lot of wars. The surgeons was in very big need in army, also in cities. So Peter had a very practical aim in mind. Absolutely. Peter really wanted to overhaul the archaic Russian education system, creating a vast collection of books, specimens, and medical and scientific paraphernalia for students to use.

Peter studied the implements, perhaps even using some of these tools to extract the odd tooth from one of his subjects. The Kunst Camera grew to become one of the biggest scientific collections in history. When the printing press arrived in Russia, he personally promoted the technology to further disseminate knowledge to his people.

Call manuals and Western books into Russia, but he read them himself, he annotated themselves. His surviving library is full of his own jottings and his own writing. It's this urge to improve and to put them into practice that marks Peter out as a great czar, as Peter the Great. In September 1721, Sweden was finally defeated, and Peter was officially proclaimed Peter the Great, emperor of all Russia.

But by this point, his health was in decline. The man who would overcome the might of the Swedish Empire and put Russia firmly on the world stage was to be defeated by a bladder infection. As last rites were administered, Peter gasped, I hope God will forgive my many sins because of the good I tried to do. He sank into a coma,

and at 6 a.m. on the 28th of January, 1725, Peter died at the age of 52. Peter the Great had a life that you quite simply couldn't make up. He was the father of European thinking and innovation in Russia and made the country a great power. But to achieve this took both extremes of Peter's personality. At the time, there were plenty of people who didn't think he was so great. You know, the old aristocracy, the treasury.

I mean, he pretty much bankrupted the country with all these wars. So views of Peter at the time were much more conflicted. A lot of people would not have said Peter was great. Peter personally and Russia as a society, and of course all the thousands and thousands of victims who died in this headlong rush to modernity were the high price that had to be paid if Russia was going to be turned

from an antiquated, backward-looking, inward-looking state into the formidable power which has been a dominant force in world affairs ever since Peter lived. Did he have to be that brutal? Did he have to torture his own son to death? Probably yes. Although his private life defies belief,

even today, within that madness was one constant, his sheer drive and energy. His force of will led not only to the construction of this great city, but created a Russia that was more respected in Europe than ever before. After Peter, Russia would always be a force to be reckoned with. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more.

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