He moved the Russian capital from Moscow to the new model city of Saint Petersburg, which marked the birth of the imperial era, and led a cultural revolution that introduced a modern, scientific, rationalist, and Western-oriented system.

[19] Following the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century, the traditional alliance of autocratic monarchy, the church, and the aristocracy was widely seen as the only basis for preserving the social order and Russian statehood, which legitimized the rule of the Romanov dynasty.

22 October] 1721, the day of the announcement of the Treaty of Nystad, the Governing Senate and Synod invested the tsar with the titles of Peter the Great,[26] Pater Patriae (father of the fatherland),[h] and Imperator of all Russia.

Several of Peter I's associates are well-known, including François Le Fort, Boris Sheremetev, Alexander Menshikov, Jacob Bruce, Mikhail Golitsyn, Anikita Repnin, and Alexey Kelin.

Instead of imposing the traditional punishment of drawing and quartering, Catherine issued secret instructions that the executioners should execute death sentences quickly and with minimal suffering, as part of her effort to introduce compassion into the law.

The Russian Imperial Romanov family was executed by who were believed to be drunken Bolshevik revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky, as ordered by the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918.

As Western European economic growth accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, Russia began to lag ever farther behind, creating new weaknesses for the empire seeking to play a role as a great power.

The result was the Decembrist revolt (December 1825), which was the work of a small circle of liberal nobles and army officers who wanted to install Nicholas' brother Constantine as a constitutional monarch.

Since playing a major role in the defeat of Napoleon, Russia had been regarded as militarily invincible, but against a coalition of the great powers of Europe, the reverses it suffered on land and sea exposed the weakness of Emperor Nicholas I's regime.

Russia's nationalist diplomats and generals persuaded Alexander II to force the Ottomans to sign the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, creating an enlarged, independent Bulgaria that stretched into the southwestern Balkans.

At the Congress of Berlin in July 1878, Russia agreed to the creation of a smaller Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, as a vassal state and an autonomous principality inside the Ottoman Empire, respectively.

To replace Muslim refugees who had fled across the new frontier into Ottoman territory, the Russian authorities settled large numbers of Christians from ethnically diverse communities in Kars Oblast, particularly Georgians, Caucasus Greeks, and Armenians, each of whom hoped to achieve protection and advance their own regional ambitions.

During his reign, Russia formed the Franco-Russian Alliance, to contain the growing power of Germany; completed the conquest of Central Asia; and demanded important territorial and commercial concessions from China.

The Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, supported the idea of forming a small elite of professional revolutionists, subject to strong party discipline, to act as the vanguard of the proletariat, in order to seize power by force.

[102] The Russians were imbued with patriotic earnestness and Germanophobic sentiment, including the name of the capital, Saint Petersburg, which sounded too German for the sake of words Sankt- and -burg; and was renamed Petrograd.

[105] By August 1914, Russia had invaded with unexpected speed the German province of East Prussia, ending with a humiliating defeat at Tannenberg, owing to a message sent without wiring and coding,[106] causing the destruction of the entire second army.

On 29 October 1914, a prelude to the Russo-Turkish front, the Turkish fleet, with German support, began to raid Russian coastal cities in Odessa, Sevastopol, Novorossiysk, Feodosia, Kerch, and Yalta[119] This led Russia to declare war on the Ottoman Empire on 2 November.

[128] In the city of Pskov, 262 km (163 mi) southwest from the capital, many generals and politicians advised the Emperor to abdicate in favor of the Tsarevich; Nicholas accepted, but he bequeathed the throne to Grand Duke Michael as his legitimate successor.

It then ran to the Curonian Lagoon in the southern Baltic Sea, and then to the mouth of the Danube, taking a great circular sweep to the west to embrace east-central Poland, and separating Russia from Prussia, Austrian Galicia, and Romania.

Following the Swedish defeat in the Finnish War of 1808–1809 and the signing of the Treaty of Fredrikshamn on 17 September 1809, the eastern half of Sweden, the area that then became Finland, was incorporated into the Russian Empire as an autonomous grand duchy.

[134] Regarding irrationality, Russia avoided the full force of the European Enlightenment, which gave priority to rationalism, preferring the romanticism of an idealized nation state that reflected the beliefs, values, and behavior of the distinctive people.

Since the majority consisted of conservative elements (the landowners and urban delegates), the progressives had little chance of representation at all, save for the curious provision that one member at least in each government was to be chosen from each of the five classes represented in the college.

That the Duma had any radical elements was mainly due to the peculiar franchise enjoyed by the seven largest towns — Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Riga, and the Polish cities of Warsaw and Łódź.

Under the Treaty of Nystad of 1721, the Baltic German nobility retained considerable powers of self-government and numerous privileges in matters affecting education, police, and the local administration of justice.

From 1891 to 1892, peasants were faced with new policies carried out by Ivan Vyshnegradsky, causing a famine and disease that took the lives of four hundred thousand people,[146][147] especially in the Volga region, eliciting the greatest decline in grain production.

The ecclesiastical heads of the national Russian Orthodox Church consisted of three metropolitans (Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev), fourteen archbishops and fifty bishops, all drawn from the ranks of the monastic (celibate) clergy.

[156] In contrast, Emperor Alexander III resumed an atmosphere of oppression, including the May Laws, which further restricted Jewish settlements and rights to own property, as well as limiting the types of professions available,[155][159] and the expulsion of Jews from Kiev in 1886 and Moscow in 1891.

[188] Most of the enlisted soldiers and sailors were peasant conscripts, though by the late 19th century Imperial Navy preferred to draft members of the urban working class to fill its more technical roles.

The order of November 1906 provided that the various strips of land held by each peasant should be merged into a single holding; the Duma, however, on the advice of the government, left its implementation to the future, regarding it as an ideal that could only gradually be realized.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example, ridiculed the St. Petersburg newspapers, such as Golos and Peterburgskii Listok, accusing them of publishing trifles and distracting readers from the pressing social concerns of contemporary Russia through their obsession with spectacle and European popular culture.