After three hundred years Peter the Great retains his hold over the imagination of Russia as well as the rest of the world. For Russians in particular, the absorbing issue is the significance of his reign and of what are usually called his reforms. Did they really change Russia? Were they a good thing or a bad thing? Did they lead to democracy? To 1917? To the participation of Russia in European culture? To the alienation of Russia from its spiritual home in Orthodoxy? These are the questions which the story of Peter the Great will elicit in Russia and probably always has elicited, and this book will offer a direct answer to none of them.

I will offer no direct answer because it is my argument that Peter's reign has remained in large and crucial areas unknown. We cannot evaluate the significance of Peter's actions until we know what they were, and the traditional accounts have this in common that they do not tell us enough about those actions. It is my aim to rewrite the political narrative of the reign and its antecedents, using sources which have been largely bypassed or underutilized in the study of the period. The principal result of a new narrative of the politics of Peter's time will be to elucidate the informal structures of power in the Russian state.

Russian and Western historiography of Peter reflects the grand divisions of thought on the Russian past, perhaps more thoroughly than any other subject.